Disgrace

Nearly a week later, I am still in disbelief.  The events of January 6^th at the U.S. Capitol shock the conscience.

That is, if you have a conscience.  The redneck mob that assaulted the Capitol after being whipped into a frenzy by their lame duck President lacked this essential element of character.  The resulting melee hasn’t deterred the base; this morning an FBI bulletin released to the media warned of more armed demonstrations at the U.S. Capitol and all fifty state capitols.

The optics of the forcible occupation elude its perpetrators.  The death of a Capitol police officer and the injury of several more doesn’t seem to faze them.  Neither does the threatened prosecution of its identifiable culprits nor their loss of employment in some cases.

No, instead we hear about the San Diego woman shot to death by the police as she forced her way through a broken window.  Her husband described her as a “patriot,” a term debased by conservatives over the years and trampled in filth over the past four.  Although her death was unfortunate and perhaps even tragic, she nonetheless met her end committing a violent criminal act.

And to what end?  The mob delayed certification of the Electoral College vote by six hours and caused considerable damage to a national monument which will fall upon the taxpayers to repair.  Attempting to subvert a constitutional process, to undermine the United States Constitution itself, is the polar opposite of patriotism.  All identifiable participants should be prosecuted for sedition.

It’s unlikely they will.  White privilege will out.  The small police presence on Capitol Hill last Wednesday was rooted in an assumption that a demonstration by white people was not a potential threat.  Contrast this to last summer’s George Floyd protests, which were not only met by local law enforcement in the larger cities but by a constellation of state and federal police agencies and the National Guard to boot.

Consider the intentions of some of the invaders when we raise the question of penalties.  One had threatened to shoot Nancy Pelosi in the head on social media.  Another was photographed in the Senate chamber carrying zip tie handcuffs as if they planned to take hostages.  Then there was the gallows erected at the Capitol steps.  One could go on with like examples.

There is little doubt concerning the crowd’s sentiments, as evinced by the Confederate flags and Nazi paraphernalia about.  If you needed further convincing, take the bitter remark one woman made to Andrew McCormick of The Nation concerning the police.  “They’re shooting us,” she said.  “They’re supposed to shoot BLM, but they’re shooting the patriots.”

There you have it.  It’s law enforcement’s job to kill civil rights activists, not rioting white supremacists.  The destruction of a display honoring the late congressman John Lewis further underscores the racist nature of the insurrection.  In any case, the actions of law enforcement officers varied from actually doing their job defending the Capitol and its occupants, to making themselves scarce rather than confronting the assailants, to mingling with the rioters and posing for selfies with them. 

Meanwhile, buzz on the alt-right is framing the riot as a subversion.  It was the fault of the ever-elusive “outside agitators” and “antifa.”  The base continues to stick with is its narrative of deep-state conspiracies and pedophile elites.  No fable is too wild to be believed.

The Dems for their part, despite their victory at the polls, continue to flail impotently at the sociopath occupying 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  The House is moving to impeach a President whose remaining time in office is down to mere days.  If they somehow succeed, and the Senate somehow convicts, the only effect will be to afford Mike Pence the distinction of serving the shortest presidential tenure in history.  Any attempt to invoke the 25^th Amendment is a nonstarter considering Pence’s refusal to even consider it combined with multiplying cabinet vacancies. 

January 20^th will be here soon enough.  Trump refuses to attend the inauguration, and it’s just as well.  But it’s foolish to assume the nightmare will end.  Talk of street protests in DC and elsewhere is rife, and will almost certainly take place.  Having had a taste of the potential havoc they can unleash militant rightists will feel empowered to repeat it.  Even as I write, Texas officials are concerned Trump’s visit to the border town of Alamo will lead to further violence.

For all their loud talk of freedom and love of country, the base poses an existential threat to our constitutional order and the liberties and rights it guarantees.  It’s doubtful many of them actually understand these.  Or care to.  I’m reminded of how common Russians welcomed the 1917 revolution believing that freedom meant absolutely no constraints on their behavior.  As we know, they were soon disabused of that notion, but I think a similar attitude animates the MAGA crowd.

It took almost four years, but I’m fully cognizant of how bad the situation truly is.  I never distrusted my own people until now.  The worst of it is there’s no escape.  We have so mismanaged the coronavirus pandemic that few countries will admit Americans.  I can’t even believe I’m entertaining thoughts of expatriating; I used to scoff at people who said they would leave if the candidate they opposed won.  Now I’m in the bizarre situation where I’m considering it myself, even after the guy I voted for won.  I want to live somewhere inhabited by sane people, if or when that becomes a possibility again.

In the meantime, it looks like the inmates will continue to run the asylum.  Don’t expect reason to prevail any time soon in the madhouse our country has become.

 

 © 2021 The Unassuming Scholar

More Headlines

“US Capitol Breached” / “Mob Invades Capitol” – CNN

“Pro-Trump Mob Brings Chaos to DC” / “DC Mayor Declares Curfew” – MSNBC

“Trump Addresses Capitol Violence in Taped Video as National Guard is Deployed” / “Some GOP Congress Members to Object to Electoral College Certification” – Fox News

“Pro-Trump Protestors Swarm U.S. Capitol, National Guard Deployed” – Reuters

“Capitol Breached by Protestors; Woman Shot Inside” – ABC News

“Biden Calls Capitol Riot ‘Insurrection’” / “Pence to Mob Storming Capitol: Immediately Leave the Building” – Gannett

“Trump Enters Burn-it-Down Mode” - Politico

“World Leaders Express Shock at Storming of US Capitol” / “Biden Calls on Mob to ‘Pull Back;’ Urges Restoring Decency” – AP

“Trump Sends Mixed Messages That Inflamed Tensions” / “Democrats, Republicans Blame Trump for Inciting ‘Coup’” – Washington Post

“A Surreal Scene Unfolds in Washington as Donald Trump Tries to Undo the Election” - Time

“The Storming of Capitol Hill Organized on Social Media” – New York Times

“National Guard Will Head to the Capitol to Tamp Down Pro-Trump Insurrection” – CNBC

“Fox News Host Claims ‘Entire Society is Rigged’ after Trump Lawsuits Fail” -  Newsweek

“Democratic Lawmakers Say They Will Try to Impeach Trump Again Following Riots Over Election Conspiracy Theories He Pushed” – Business Insider

Reflections on a Lost Year

Even for us who haven’t contracted COVID or whose families have been somehow unscathed, 2020 was a lost year.  I struggle to not mourn the loss of familiar routines and pastimes when so many have been infected, or worse, lost loved ones in the pandemic, but sometimes I backslide.  The six-week winter break has begun, the first sustained period off work since we went to remote instruction, leaving me time to ruminate on the situation.

I began the year with a small irony.  On New Year’s Eve, the day China reported its first COVID cases to the World Health Organization, I was on a flight from Hong Kong to San Francisco.  I had spent the previous week in Hong Kong and Macau, sightseeing and eating dim sum.  Many of the people I saw wore face masks, but it really didn’t register since it was East Asia in the wintertime and masking is a common practice. 

I think I started noticing the news reports toward the end of January.  Spring semester began, and I was engrossed in work.  The pandemic cropped up periodically in conversation as the weeks went on.  A few people began wearing face coverings here and there.  News reports told of mass lockdowns in China and police checkpoints in Italy, but it still seemed so far away, so unreal. 

As February gave way to March, you began to see large containers of hand sanitizer in classrooms, offices, and public areas on campus.  There were exhortations to wash hands frequently.  Finally, word came down that we were going to remote instruction.  We were given about ten days to make the transition, and the administration predicted we might be able to return before the end of the term.  I took the news in stride and didn’t change my routine.  When the appointed day arrived, I taught my scheduled classes and went home.  And have stayed there ever since.

I am not proud of my complacency; I am puzzled by it.  I’m normally alarmed by news of disasters on the doorstep, but in this case I carried on nonetheless.  Looking back, I am fortunate to not have been infected or infected someone else.   The widespread resistance to mask mandates even as infection rates are again skyrocketing beggars explanation.

For me 2020 bears an eerie parallel to another lost year, 2000.  The main difference is that 2000 was lost to me and this year was lost to us all.  The two years have a lot in common, though, a controversial presidential election being the most prominent feature.  In my case, I spent that year socially distancing by default.  I was recovering from a near-fatal accident that left me permanently disabled, I was facing the loss of my career as a consequence, and my marriage was imploding.  I was hundreds of miles from home in a military hospital temporarily housed in a bare room in a soon to be demolished annex while my family stayed behind.  Then as now, tedium and anxiety over an uncertain future stalked my thoughts.

Given a choice, I would take this year over that.  I am reasonably healthy now, and the prospect of going broke is not a concern at the moment.  The continuous nausea and lack of appetite from the morphine prescribed for my pain aren’t an issue, nor do feelings of malaise keep me in bed some days.  My biggest headaches are technical glitches. If I get cabin fever, I can always go for a walk and come back feeling renewed.

It’s the uncertainty that’s the worst aspect of the pandemic aside from the disease itself.  What will work and school look like after?   Will travel at home or abroad ever be safe?  Can we even socialize normally after this?  Anthony Fauci summed it up for many when recently told an interviewer the thing he looks forward to most is dropping by a bar for a beer and a burger.  That likely won’t happen anytime soon.   I’m still leery of circulating in public unless it’s necessary.  A few months ago, I thought about marking the anniversary of my accident as I normally do.  I made a dinner reservation at a place with outdoor seating.  As the reservation time grew closer, I began to question the wisdom of going out.  I cancelled and spent the evening in.  No point taking unnecessary risks.

Signals are mixed as to how the future plays out.  Hope and dread don’t settle well with each other, but it’s the prevailing sentiment.  On a conference call with higher education administrators, Dr. Fauci said last week that with widespread immunization students and professors could return to the physical classroom as soon as fall semester 2021.  Then again, there is ominous news of a new mutation of SARS CoV-2 running amok in southeastern Britain which has led a number of EU countries to bar British visitors.  Even as I write, reports of yet another mutation in China are making the rounds.

Nevertheless, the pandemic will subside at some point.  There remains the matter of preexisting ills exacerbated by the crisis.  Social division and a slide toward outright violent conflict won’t miraculously subside just because Donald Trump is leaving office.  We’ve arrived at a point where we are incapable of living together.  The last four tears, and this year in particular, have pulled back the screen to reveal us as a fragmented people seething with hatred and resentment.  I don’t think there is any turning back; the damage is permanent.  We’ll return to a form of surface normalcy, but the dysfunction will persist underneath.

 

© 2020 The Unassuming Scholar

Bloody Shirt

 

As the Electoral College casts its vote, the “Stop the Steal” crowd is doubling down on its baffling inability to accept that their man lost the election.  The hyperbole emanating from social media is disturbing.

Although Arizona’s 11 presidential electors cast their votes earlier today for Joe Biden, the Arizona Republican Party retweeted a post from one of the true believers proclaiming, “I am willing to give my life for this fight.”  The AZ GOP appended the comment with its own: “He is.  Are you?”

I want to shrug off rhetoric like this.  Four years ago, I would have simply responded with an eyeroll.  Events since then, and particularly in the past year, make me take it seriously.  It isn’t that I expect mass violence to break out, though months of confrontation between Trump supporters and civil rights activists gives cause for concern.  Inflammatory statements like this tweet are bound to motivate some crazy fool to act on them.

During the countdown to Inauguration Day, expect the heavily surreal political atmosphere to thicken into a pall.  The astounding refusal of the “base” to accept the outcome in the face of contrary evidence reflects a complete break from reality.  Their fealty to a morally bankrupt man has morphed into a quasi-religious cause, with gestures such as the AZ GOP retweet being akin to the waving of a mythic bloody shirt.

Fortunately, I can socially isolate and don’t have to chance the possibility of face to face discussions with these people.  But I did learn the sentiments of some of my students since November 3^rd from their discussion posts and written assignments.  Several of them asserted the election was illegitimate, that votes weren’t counted, that dead people and the “illegals” cast votes, and so forth.  It’s annoying to read this tripe, but I resolved to remain professional (and keep my blood pressure down) by choosing not to engage.  I did the same in my live classes before we went remote, even when the Trumpies became more vocal as the election cycle got closer.

It’s too soon for me to worry about personal confrontations on campus or elsewhere, being that the pandemic has entered another lethal wave.  (That said, another brand of irrationality will cause some of us to refuse masks or to receive the vaccination once it becomes widely available, thereby prolonging the crisis.)  I have the luxury of watching events unfold from my living room.  But we need to learn to live together once the dust has settled, and there is a feeling somehow that a line has been crossed.  Don’t expect the violence of words and of deeds to abate after January 20^th.

 

 

© 2020 The Unassuming Scholar

What Next?

Synopsis: Biden won.  This changes nothing. 

It appears Joe Biden has won the presidency.

I wish I could be more satisfied with the outcome.  The past four years have been demoralizing for anyone who aspires to living in a just and equitable society.  But that doesn’t mean a new administration is going to undo the social damage wrought by its predecessor.  The past few days have not been reassuring.

People on both sides suffer from cognitive dissonance.  Predictably, the “base” is crying that the election was “stolen,” that ballots voted for the President were destroyed or misplaced through the malfeasance of “crooked” poll workers, and so forth.  Their opponents can’t believe that the President wasn’t defeated by a wider margin.  A news article quotes a Planned Parenthood official as registering shock that Biden didn’t win by a landslide, an outcome she found “hurtful.”

These examples show that we live within our own self-constructed ideological bubbles, abetted by the multiplicity of media outlets we curate so that we’re always told what we want to hear.  This tendency predates cable news, the internet, and social media, though.  An apocryphal story made the rounds after Richard Nixon’s 49-state sweep in 1972 in which film critic Pauline Kael said she couldn’t believe Nixon won because no one she knew voted for him.

Presidential elections are as much about political theater as they are about choosing a chief executive.  They are occasions in which our beliefs and prejudices acquire a performative aspect reflected in the presumed attributes of our favored candidate.  But the 2016 election didn’t have an “off” switch.  This year’s probably won’t, either.  The pervasive anger amongst us that had bubbled just beneath the surface of our national life festered over and won’t be easily contained simply because we’ve replaced the individual at the center of the phenomenon.

Journalists and social scientists struggle to comprehend what animates the President’s most fervent supporters.  I don’t have that problem.  My life has been torn between two conflicting identities, one of which I chose and one that I was born into.   I grew up in a rural, white, working class milieu.  My formative years were steeped in the beliefs and attitudes championed by the base.  The minority of the white working class interested in politics shifted to the Republican Party in 1970s and 80s, even though its policy preferences were manifestly against their interests.  Donald Trump’s populism electrified those who had been seething in silence for decades as social and economic change left them in the dust.  It tapped into their collective id and forced it to the top.  Trump’s defeat will not tamp it down.

People on the left are inclined to use the epithet “fascist” indiscriminately.  Godwin’s Law often haunts the rhetoric.  However, the heightened saliency of populist sentiment since Barack Obama’s election does have fascistic overtones.  Fascism has many definitions, but I will use the characteristics described by Umberto Eco as my analytical model for Trumpian populism.  Eco fused the various strands of fascism into a unified concept he labeled Ur-Fascism.

The first trait Eco identifies is the cult of tradition which holds that tradition (the “way it’s always been done”) is all that’s needed and nothing new needs to be tried.  It’s manifested in an uncritical adherence to fundamentalist Christianity and an evocation of a quasi-mythical past when America was “great.”  The latter conjures up images of a postwar era in which white males dominated the social, political, and economic discourse, and women and minorities knew their place.  A desire for tradition by implication rejects a multicultural society.

The second is a rejection of modernism in the form of Enlightenment era rationalism.  It is the misapprehension that science and religion, which attempt to answer different questions, are diametrical opposites.  An open rejection of science around critical issues ranging from climate change to the COVID-19 pandemic can be seen as a symptom, along with denial or a belief in magical thinking pertaining to how they might be addressed.

The third is the cult of action for action’s sake.  Action without recourse to critical thinking is valorized, and is a facet of anti-intellectualism and the rejection of science.

The fourth is the belief that disagreement is treason.  Everyone must believe and act in lockstep, and dissent is not allowed.  Both Trump and his supporters have used the word treason to describe opposition to the President and his administration.

The fifth is fear of difference.  Where to start? 

The sixth is an appeal to middle class frustration.  This is characteristic among the suburban rather than the redneck contingent within the base, though it’s just as applicable to blue collar anxieties.  Automation, globalization, and industrialization in the developing world has rendered traditionally well-paid, low-skilled work obsolete.  Right to work laws, anti-union policies, and the gutting of defined benefit pensions championed by the same Republican politicians they enthusiastically support have further eroded their economic security.  This realization has yet to penetrate, so their frustration will continue to be aimed at the usual suspects (minorities, “illegals,” and the like).

The seventh is obsession with a plot, or an entrenched belief that there is a vast conspiracy against them.  This is pretty much QAnon’s whole schtick, though it’s generalizable to the alt-right as a whole.  You have to marvel at the sort of imagination that could concoct and believe the premise that there is a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles in the Democratic Party leadership who engage in the sex-trafficking of children, and that only Donald J. Trump can put an end to the horror.  There a long, sorry tradition of conspiracy theories in American culture, but the ones being spread by the alt-right are in a singular category.

Number eight is a self-contradictory view of the enemy.  Our opponents are strong so we must fight them, but we will prevail because they are so weak.  (Repeat this a few times, and it will make sense.)   The base is told that liberals and progressives are weak, and yet they are insidiously powerful.  (Refer to the previous paragraph.)

Contempt for the weak is the tenth characteristic.  Closely related are the eleventh and twelfth, which are heroism and machismo.  There is a streak of male supremacy within the base that they conflate with Americanism.  Their ideal is a white, hetero cis-male who is ready and willing to mete violence against those they perceive as inferior.   Gun culture is intimately interwoven with each of these notions.  The presence of armed, camo clad men at urban protests and rural disaster zones presuming to assert authority they do not legally possess reflects a contempt for the values of civil society and for those who don’t have the balls to flout them.  It goes without saying that women and the non-gender conforming cannot embody these values and must be marginalized.

The thirteenth characteristic is selective populism.  Populism should arise spontaneously, from the bottom up.  Paradoxically, a strong leader is needed to articulate and implement the collective will.  Democratic institutions which obstruct the leader’s will also oppose the true sentiments of the people and are therefore illegitimate.   From the promise to “drain the swamp” to the demonization of congressional leaders opposing him, Trump and his base have evinced this occurrence in a manner without precedent.

The final trait is a proto-Orwellian newspeak.  Reduce ideas to catchphrases.  Reduce nuanced issues to dichotomies.  Shape the discourse through narrowing the political vocabulary.

My analysis so far begs the question of why a formal party organization has not emerged on its own to advance the alt-right movement to power, rather than using the Republican Party as its vehicle.  The answer is twofold.  A key reason which worked against the radical change sought by the base are the checks and balances provided in the Constitution.  Personality was a contributing factor; Donald Trump was indifferent to the intricacies of administration and was perhaps a bit lazy to boot.    

The other reason that the Republican Party itself hasn’t adopted an overtly fascistic platform or that a fascistic third party hasn’t arisen is rooted in the nature of political parties in the U.S.  Our two major parties are coalitions of interests whose constituent components may not have a 100% commonality of interests but rather follow mutually acceptable policy preferences born of compromise.  Strongly ideological parties such as those in European parliamentary systems have never succeeded here.

Those facts are cold comfort and do not undo the polarization of the past four years.  A Biden-Harris administration is not likely to bring the country together, and the fact that the Vice President elect is a woman of color will provoke the alt-right to further rhetorical excess against women and minorities.  A new administration won’t solve systemic racial inequality or the police brutality problem, so the protests will go on with the greater potential for confrontations with armed “patriot” vigilantes. 

And there is still the possibility of Trump refusing to accept the election results and barricading himself in the White House after he’s lost all of his legal challenges while his supporters take to the streets.  A coup is a remote prospect, but Trump can still cause quite a ruckus on the way out.  It doesn’t matter anyway.  Even if he goes quietly, the damage is done.  His presidency may have been a failure, but Donald J. Trump has put his permanent stamp on American political culture.  Whatever comes is next will not be sweetness and light.

 

© 2020 The Unassuming Scholar

Some Headlines

Americans Surge to Polls: ‘I’m Going to Vote Like My Life Depends on It’ (New York Times)

Millions of Mail-in Ballots at Risk in Battleground States (Wall Street Journal)

Study Links Trump Rallies to More than 700 COVID Deaths (Politico) 

With Election Day Looming, an Anxious Nation Hears Rumblings of Violence (Washington Post)

Boards of Election: Fearing Violence, Washington Prepares (Agence France Presse)

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightoot Unveils Security Plan for Election-related Civil Unrest, Urges Peaceful Protests (Chicago Tribune)

Self-Professed 'Proud Boy' Arrested After Allegedly Threatening to Blow Up North Dakota Voting Location (Newsweek)

ICE Agents Told to ‘Be ready’ to Protect Federal Property and Quell Protests on Election Day (Business Insider)

Protests Won’t Be Enough to Stop a Coup (The Atlantic)

Voter Suppression Keeps Students from Polls (USA Today)

In Florida, Voters of Color and Young Voters Have Had Ballots Flagged for Possible Rejection at Higher Rates than Others (Washington Post)

Voting 2020 Updates: Police Pepper Spray Voting Rights Marchers in North Carolina (USA Today)

2 Florida men Accused of Stealing Mail-in Ballots from a Post Office Box (Business Insider)

Berlin's Madame Tussauds Put its Wax Trump Statue in a Garbage Bin Just Days Before US Election (Business Insider)

Think of the Children!

 

At first glance, they looked like any other group of Trump supporters demonstrating for their president.  They were predominately women and kids, maskless naturally.   A pretty typical news photo featured these days on the website of our local newspaper. 

Something in the story’s headline caught my eye.  These people weren’t actually demonstrating for the president or in solidarity with trigger-happy cops.  No, they were demonstrating against child trafficking. 

The ostensible premise for the demo seemed righteous enough until the spokeswoman for the group explained it to the reporter covering it.  They weren’t wearing masks for the commonly given reasons, such as “freedom” or the mythical Americans with Disabilities Act exemption.  Instead, they claimed mandatory masking facilitated child sex trafficking. 

This got my attention and made me read further.  It isn’t that I hadn’t heard this argument before, it’s just that it appears to be garnering increased media attention.  An article on The Intercept website this morning further piqued my curiosity, tying this latest moral panic to QAnon.  QAnon has advanced from the realm of heavy-gutted, gammon-faced, bearded white men to white stay at home moms in yoga pants. 

The manufactured crisis surrounding organized child sex abuse rings has a storied past.  I came of age during the “satanic panic” of the 1980s, during which a number of innocent adults were prosecuted and convicted for their alleged ritual abuse of kids in their care.  The best-known example was the McMartin preschool case, which dragged on for years amongst intensive media coverage.  

It began with allegations from a mother with mental health and substance abuse issues.  A credulous district attorney’s office investigated.  A child therapist coaxed lurid stories from young ones who had attended the family-owned daycare featuring secret basement passages and animal sacrifices, which prosecutors accepted at face value.  The resulting trials received national attention. 

Fortunately, the McMartin trials resulted in no convictions.  The charges were eventually dropped.  However, the McMartin family lost their livelihood.  Their daycare was sold and torn down.  It did not have a basement. 

A basement figured prominently in a latter-day child abuse conspiracy theory that almost got innocent people killed: Pizzagate.  Pizzagate originated in an email hacking of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign chair, John Podesta.  The texts of the emails first made their way onto WikiLeaks.  From there, they became a front-and-center topic in the wingnut universe aided in no small part by Alex Jones and InfoWars. 

Somehow, certain readers of routine communications among Clinton campaign staffers saw something deeper at work.  References to pizza became coded references to child sex trafficking.  Along the way, a Washington, DC pizza parlor, Comet Ping Pong, became the focus of this nefarious plot, though other businesses were implicated as well.  Comet Ping Pong allegedly had a tunnel network running from its (nonexistent) basement through which the Clinton sex slave ring moved their victims.  As the autumn of 2016 progressed, Comet employees and patrons were harassed by the believers. 

What happened next was a consequence of Jones’ audience trolling.  His on-air persona depicts him as a voice in the wilderness; he frequently tells his followers he can’t do it all alone.  He can’t fight the darkness by himself.  And so, a couple of weeks before Christmas 2016, a deluded nutter named Edgar Welch decided to “self-investigate” Comet Ping Pong.  Armed with an AR-15, Welch drove to DC from his North Carolina home.  Along the way, he recorded a “goodbye video” addressed to his daughters explaining what he was about to do. 

What he did could have been considerably worse.  No one was injured by the three rounds Welch fired into Comet Ping Pong.  Finding no child sex slaves, he exited the building and surrendered to the police waiting outside.  He is currently serving a four-year prison sentence for interstate transportation of a firearm with intent to commit an offense and assault with a dangerous weapon.  Welch’s soulmates in the alt-right disavowed him, calling the Comet Ping Pong shooting a “false flag” operation designed to discredit them.   

This brand of wingnuttery has been a part of the social landscape since forever, but it gained quasi-respectability in ‘90s when all kinds of absurd rumors swirled around Bill and Hillary Clinton.  It became more accepted during the Obama years.  The Trump upset in 2016 brought its adherents to the forefront. 

Against this backdrop, it is unsurprising to find that a belief in conspiracies has gone mainstream.  The Intercept article reflects how far it has penetrated the consciousness of ordinary, otherwise reasonable people.  It is no longer outlandish to believe Donald Trump is engaged in a secret war against well-connected pedos, that climate change is a hoax, that the Chinese concocted the coronavirus in a secret lab, that vaccines cause autism, that mandatory masking in public encourages human trafficking, that the survivors of the Newtown and Parkland shootings were really “crisis actors,” that Black Lives Matter is led by Marxists, that antifa is an actual organization, that the Democratic Party is part of the radical left, and so forth.   

The internet democratized access to information.  In the process, it has given respectability to uninformed opinion by making it ubiquitous.  It has also made traditional print journalism economically unviable; the shift to online content rendered full-time reporters redundant.  The concomitant decline of investigative journalism created a vacuum filled by innuendo and rumor.  Post-truth has become real.  

But as the Bard said, the fault lies not in the stars but in ourselves.  Americans are poster children for the Dunning-Kruger Effect.  We routinely substitute our personal judgment for empirically established facts.  We scorn science in favor of our own self-serving conception of “common sense.”  Worse still, we ignore the lessons of history and willfully support the counterproductive polices of our political and business leaders. 

The protest moms are undoubtedly sincere in their convictions.  Too bad they ignore the real threats to our future generations.

 

 

 

© 2020 The Unassuming Scholar