Filling the Void When Trust Disappears

 

Let’s face it. Liberals don’t trust the Trump administration. Trump supporters don’t trust anyone who disagrees with the President, noting that mainstream media are the “enemy of the people.” Most Americans don’t trust the CDC or the FDA as they rush “way too fast” to approve the creation of a new vaccine. Liberals laugh at Breitbart and Fox News, while right-wing pundits scoff at CNN and MSNBC, and many folks think of ABC and CBS News as vanilla without the bean. Russian disinformation, expertly disseminated, finds its way into the ether, as fake news slowly gets the “snowball to avalanche” effect and is taken as gospel simply based on the volume of messaging.

I’ll never forget that phrase from Kellyanne Conway, "alternative facts," created in a January 22, 2017 interview on Meet the Press, defending Donald Trump’s proclivity to play fast and loose with the truth… and by then, truth had long since left the building. Looking back over the Trump administration’s pronouncements during his campaign and term in office, the net results included severe polarization (the growth of irreconcilable factions), the death of a willingness to compromise and, perhaps most of all, the crushing and pervasive lack of trust among us all. Nasty stuff, but when trust goes, there is a void. The most dangerous development, however, is what fills that void… and the consequences to democracy, truth and the very viability of the nation itself.

The growth of conspiracy theories and fake news, the desperate craving of those who harbor views that were never considered acceptable to find support for their “outside the bounds of logic and facts” views, allows highly biased factions to “repeal” easily provably facts (except many no longer believe once credible sources) and replace them with “alternative facts” supported by the wide dissemination of conspiracy theories and totally fabricated “truths.” The trust void is almost always filled with “something else.”

New York Times Op-Ed writer, Farhad Manjoo, explains (October 21^st) some recently-released Harvard-driven research on the subject: “Joan Donovan, the research director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School… is a pioneering scholar of misinformation and media manipulation — the way that activists, extremists and propagandists surf currents in our fragmented, poorly moderated media ecosystem to gain attention and influence society… Donovan’s research team studies online lies the way crash-scene investigators study aviation disasters. They meticulously take apart specific hoaxes, conspiracy theories, viral political memes, harassment campaigns and other toxic online campaigns in search of the tactics that made each one explode into the public conversation… Donovan’s team published ‘The Media Manipulation Casebook,’ a searchable online database of their research. It makes for grim reading — an accounting of the many failures of journalists, media companies, tech companies, policymakers, law enforcement officials and the national security establishment to anticipate and counteract the liars who seek to dupe us. Armed with these investigations, Donovan hopes we can all do better.

“I hope she’s right. But studying her work also got me wondering whether we’re too late. Many Americans have become so deeply distrustful of one another that whatever happens on Nov. 3, they may refuse to accept the outcome. Every day I grow more fearful that the number of those Americans will be large enough to imperil our nation’s capacity to function as a cohesive society.

“‘I’m worried about political violence,’ Donovan told me. America is heavily armed, and from Portland to Kenosha to the Michigan governor’s mansion, we have seen young men radicalized and organized online beginning to take the law into their own hands. Donovan told me she fears that ‘people who are armed are going to become dangerous, because they see no other way out.’…

“Donovan worries about two factors in particular. One is the social isolation caused by the pandemic. Lots of Americans are stuck at home, many economically bereft and cut off from friends and relatives who might temper their passions — a perfect audience for peddlers of conspiracy theories.

“Her other major worry is the conspiracy lollapalooza known as QAnon. It’s often short-handed the way Savannah Guthrie did at her town hall takedown of Donald Trump last week — as a nutty conspiracy theory in which a heroic Trump is prosecuting a secret war against a satanic pedophile ring of lefty elites… But that undersells QAnon’s danger. To people who have been ‘Q-pilled,’ QAnon plays a much deeper role in their lives; it has elements of a support group, a political party, a lifestyle brand, a collective delusion, a religion, a cult, a huge multiplayer game and an extremist network.

“Donovan thinks QAnon represents a new, flexible infrastructure for conspiracy. QAnon has origins in a tinfoil-hat story about a D.C.-area pizza shop, but over the years it has adapted to include theories about the ‘deep state’ and the Mueller probe, Jeffrey Epstein, and a wild variety of misinformation about face masks, miracle cures, and other hoaxes regarding the coronavirus. QAnon has been linked to many instances of violence, and law enforcement and terrorism researchers discuss it as a growing security threat.

“‘We now have a densely networked conspiracy theory that is extendible, adaptable, flexible and resilient to take down,’ Donovan said of QAnon. It’s a very internet story, analogous to the way Amazon expanded from an online bookstore into a general-purpose system for selling anything to anyone.”

The threat to America is to incite a level of “patriotic” violence – perceived to require a violent individual effort to crush the subject matter of the conspiracy theory – added to a widely shared  and pervasive belief that COVID-19 is fading, and that mask-wearing and social distancing are both a sign of weakness and the major factors keeping our economy from recovering. Both positions would result in lots of serious injuries, suffering and deaths. The combined impact could well be the end of the United States itself, through extreme and prolonged illness and civil war.

The problem pits our First Amendment against the dangers of conspiracy theories. Is the adding real consequences to the dissemination of harmful conspiracy theories “censorship” or is it more akin to holding someone who caused panic in a movie theater by yelling “fire” when there is no fire? Or is subscribing to conspiracy theories any different from seeking a religious explanation for the meaning of life? “People ‘are seeking answers and they’re finding a very receptive community in QAnon,’ Donovan said.

“This is a common theme in disinformation research: What makes digital lies so difficult to combat is not just the technology used to spread them, but also the nature of the societies they’re targeting, including their political cultures. Donovan compares QAnon to the Rev. Charles Coughlin, the priest whose radio show spread anti-Semitism in the Depression-era United States. Stopping Coughlin’s hate took a concerted effort, involving new regulations for radio broadcasters and condemnation of Coughlin by the Catholic Church.

“Stopping QAnon will be harder; Coughlin was one hatemonger with a big microphone, while QAnon is a complex, decentralized, deceptive network of hate. But the principle remains: Combating the deception that has overrun public discourse should be a primary goal of our society. Otherwise, America ends in lies.” That it could end is the ultimate consequence.

            I’m Peter Dekom, and if we cannot get truth and facts into the headlights of the vast majority of Americans again, is this really a nation worth trying to hold together?