We sadly have to now have another sad conversation.
We'll start today's show at the start is kind of a bummer, but we're gonna get to some interesting
things.
If you bear with me, we have to have a really serious conversation about the growing reality
that the conspiracy theorists are to a great degree winning right now surrounding Corona.
Now, I want to be really careful here.
This includes Corona virus related conspiracy theories.
But I'm also talking about conspiracy theories that are being floated now to distract from
the administration's failed handling of the virus.
I'm going to talk about both things.
And I should be clear that when I say the conspiracy theorists are winning, I don't
mean most people believe the conspiracies.
That's not what I mean.
But there is an asymmetric priority here.
When I say the conspiracy theorists are winning.
What I mean is enough people are either falling for the conspiracy theories or reporting endlessly
on the conspiracy theories such that it is wreaking havoc on the overall dissemination
of real information and distracting from a focus on what matters.
And that's why when this pond scum nonsense starts to spread.
They don't need to get 51 percent of the population to believe it.
They don't even need to get 20 percent of the population to believe it.
They only need to do enough to wreak havoc in the media and distract from the real scandals.
Really good piece in The Atlantic by Jeffrey Goldberg, which actually goes into this and
it goes further and it says The impact of these conspiracy theories winning is not just
on Corona virus, but it's actually a bigger challenge to enlightenment values and to reality
itself, which we're going to dig into.
There's also a piece in VOX by Sean Ayling, which talks about sort of the media's handling
component and how Trump uses the media to spread his conspiratorial disinformation specifically
to distract from his failings.
And we're going to talk about that as well.
So first of all, let's start with Jeffrey Goldberg's piece in The Atlantic.
And in that piece, Jeffrey Goldberg says Trump does not defend our democracy from the ruinous
consequences of conspiracy thinking.
Instead, he embraces such thinking, a conspiracy theory.
Birtherism was his path.
Way to power and in office, he warns of the threat of the deep state with the ferocity
of a KUA non disciple.
He has even begun to question the official coronavirus death toll, which he sees as evidence
of a dark plot against him.
How is he different from Alex Jones, from the conspiracy manufacturers of Russia and
the Middle East?
He lives in the White House.
That is one main difference.
This improbable question.
How did a person with a weakness for a conspiratorial thinking achieve the presidency might be among
the most consequential of the coming election, which is not merely a political contest, but
a referendum on enlightenment values and on reality itself?
Nonsense is nonsense.
Except when it kills and conspiracy thinking, especially when advanced by the president
of the United States, is an existential threat.
And so when you think of all the ways in which Trump supports this new conspiracy ism, there
are many.
So yeah.
As Goldberg points out, the big foray into politics for Trump was birtherism against
Barack Obama.
This idea that Barack Obama may not have been born in the United States may not be Mitt
may not qualify for the presidency because of the birthplace of his parents, but his
entire trade politics were also based around these sort of go too far ideas about China.
And it went simply from being about currency and intellectual property.
Theft into climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese.
We see it front and center on the virus.
Everything from Trump pushing chloroquine is the cure.
What do you have to lose from from very, very early on to it will just go away to the entire
thing that we've seen recently from Donald Trump about just ignoring the fact that there
are people dying every single day from this.
And of course, with conspiracies, when there's a grain of truth, as there almost always is.
It helps the conspiracy to grab a foothold.
We've talked about this before.
The virus did originate in China.
It just didn't come from a lab lab.
It wasn't mass manmade in a bio weapon.
Trump says it will go away.
Well, I mean, of course, at some point it will either kill everybody who's not immune.
And then you've got herd immunity and everyone who died has already died.
Like eventually it'll go away or we'll get a vaccine or whatever the case may be.
Eventually it will go away.
That doesn't mean that we just open up the economy and do nothing.
And then Trump says, well, some governors are being heavy handed.
That becomes armed protests by the same people who think Bill Gates is involved in some nefarious
way to fund a vaccine that will lead to a dystopian population control nightmare that
Bill Gates will be in charge of.
And again, just enough people fall for this stuff that it takes attention away from what
matters and from what's real, keeping people safe.
Understanding when Trump is lying to us, minimizing damage to the economy in a responsible way,
working together to get past the lockdown phase.
And, of course, just enough people fall for this stuff that it starts to get media attention.
And that's how they win.
They don't need to be proven right.
They merely need to justify their existence by getting just enough attention.
And where we are seeing it now, front and center is with this Obama gate stuff.
I don't plan on covering Obama gate very much.
I'm gonna do a clipper to here or there for the purposes of debunking what's being said.
But this is how Trump controls the media.
Sean Ayling for VOX writes, Trump has been able to essentially win merely by turning
the last week of right wing media and even some centrist and standard corporate media
into adjudications and debates about Obama gate.
Any minute that is spent talking about Obama gate is a minute that they are distracting
their viewers from the mounting death toll, the failed response.
The fact that South Korea and Taiwan got it under control right away and we did not.
We still have inadequate testing levels.
And it's a tactic that Steve Bannon.
I don't know that Steve Bannon invented it.
Certainly he probably did not.
But he uses it.
And it's called zone flooding, flood the zone with this stuff and forced the media to cover
it.
You don't need to convince a huge portion of the public.
You just need to get coverage and get people arguing on one side of Obama gate or on the
other side of O'Bama gate.
And the media have really not adapted to be able to handle this.
As Sean Shandling says, the media aren't gate keeping the B.S. stories and to some degree,
media are allowing more and more discussion of obamma gate because it's ratings.
That's number one.
To some degree, media want more and more discussion of O'Bama gate because if they don't talk
about it, it'll trigger a round of B.S. attacks against them.
Look at how biased they are.
Fox is.
Covering Obama gate fake news, CNN and The Washington Post won't cover it.
So part of it is they don't want to be seen.
They're scared of being accused of suppressing the story altogether.
And the mere discussion causes what we call the illusory truth effects, even if most media
outlets are bringing it up to debunk it.
Exposure to the claims alone will get some people believing them.
Even if you do what you believe is the responsible thing, you only bring up Obamacare.
Obama gate to debunk it as the bogus conspiracy theory that it is.
You are exposing more people to the claim and more people may end up believing the conspiracy
theory.
So at least for now, I'm not going to participate in the Obama gate stuff.
We're gonna talk about it only at an absolute minimum and we will talk about it when there
is, you know, a relevant implosion by the right related to it.
Our audience also is not a general audience.
It's people already following this stuff.
But they win when they get enough of the population talking about this stuff, even if they're
not changing minds.
And the real impact is that large swaths of the country reopening in the middle of part
of a pandemic are doing so partially because of these conspiracy theories about everything
from Bill Gates and government tyranny and heavy handed this and that Obama gate distraction.
All of this stuff is playing a role in getting policy to be what they want rather than what
public health dictates.
Let me know what you think.
I'm on Twitter at David Pakman and we'll have a few types of follow up on this coming up
later today.