Barry Spector's Blog

If you want people to get nothing done but conflict, convince them they are on one side of something. Only violence will result. What two needs is to become three. The unifying story is the crucial third factor which turns opposition into a spiral. – John Michael Greer

Politics is the entertainment division of the military-industrial complex. – Frank Zappa

I won’t deny my strong opinions, and I invite conversations that don’t descend into ridicule. If I’ve given some attention to vaccination, it’s because it’s so critical to understand how many liberals are allowing themselves to be diverted from more important issues. “Russiagate” does exactly that.

Here is the logic:

A – The “intelligence community” asserts without proof that Russia hacked the 2016 election.

B – Liberals believe the conventional wisdom.

B – Trumpus says there was no collusion, etc.

C – Trumpus bad; Trumpus is a dupe of Putin (despite sending arms to Ukraine). 

D – Leftists assert that Trumpus won because of apathy, gerrymandering and voter suppression, not Russians.

E – Therefore, leftists are all dupes of Putin and should be de-platformed.

When we stop questioning why liberals are allowed to marginalize leftists, it becomes easy to accept this drivel from the WAPO: Poll: 60 percent disapprove of Trump, while clear majorities back Mueller and Sessions. Now, not only are we happily hating on Trumpus, but we find a new meme injected into our spinning heads: the alleged savior, Mueller, was on the same side as the fascist Jeff Sessions, and we barely noticed.

Here’s a right-wing FE. This one requires cognitive dissonance:

A – Communists bad, un-American.

B – Russia was communist.

C – Russia became capitalist 30 years ago.

D – Putin bad.

E – Putin Russian.

F – Therefore Putin communist.

G – To believe F, one must ignore C (this is cognitive dissonance).

But my concerns go very far beyond this one issue. I’m talking about a post-9/11 era in which our freedoms, including freedom of privacy and freedom of choice, have been disappearing gradually and imperceptibly. It is only our bred-in-the-bones sense of innocence that keeps us from noticing that the pot is boiling, that we are all being cooked; it is only our constantly manipulated fear of the Other that can still reliably distract us from far more important issues such as Global Warming. Republicans are clearly not the only ones to do this, as the national security state’s obsession, even under (or over) a Democratic president, with prolonging the war with Russia (and eventually with China) indicates.

Despite their superficial concerns for personal freedom, conservatives (at least those with stock in Big Pharma) are probably celebrating the gathering liberal momentum to mandate vaccinations for all Americans, young or old. Perhaps you agree. But please ask yourself if, in our quickening slide toward American Fascism, you are condoning yet another loss of freedom in yet another dispute where almost all of the money is on one side of the issue. Cui bono?

Let me repeat that: almost all of the money is on one side of the issue. Granted, one New York couple has allegedly donated $3 million to anti-vax causes, but outside of that amount (which pales in comparison to the billions spent by Big Pharma), I haven’t found anyone else.

Consider the significant issues in our lifetimes. Every single time – with the sole exception of the fight to unionize – the vast majority of money spent has been by the military-industrial complex, the churches, the lobbyists, the corporations, the AMA, the NRA, Big Agriculture, Big Lumber, Big Mining, Big Chemical, Big Tobacco, Big Banks, Big Auto, Big Cancer Research, Big Oil, Big Fracking, Big Coal, Big Soda, Big Voter Suppression, Big Internet, Private Prisons, the anti-immigration industry. Even the “family values” debates: it was and remains the ultra-rich who have subsidized the segregationists, the Tea Party, the anti-union, anti-birth control, anti-abortion, anti-medical canabis and anti-gay marriage movements.

All except for the vaccination dispute, which has a consumer protection movement begun by aggrieved parents and some libertarians on one side (joined of course by self-serving right-wing politicians), and a trillion-dollar industry on the other hand, one that spends $150 million/year lobbying Congress and $5 billion/year on advertising, one that generates so much profit that it can annually absorb billion-dollar fines for corruption and bad science without scaring its stockholders.

And who supports this side? A legion of “Quackwatch”- type gatekeepers of dubious reputation and secretive funding  – and a volunteer legion of liberals armed with false equivalencies. It also includes one of your and my favorite progressive comedians, John Oliver, using Trumpus himself as an example of a loony vaccine skeptic. Now that is professional FE-ing: Trumpus over there, along with those anti-vaxxers; us smart people over here.

I hope you’ve noticed that I am not advocating any particular position.

I’m simply trying to put things in perspective. If I’ve raised any doubts in your mind, if I’ve provoked a strong negative response, I’m hoping that at least you’ll open some of the links I provided in Part Nine. Though I welcome a good argument, I avoid ideological absolutes. That is a language to which I am trying to offer an alternative, the language of mythological thinking. I am not talking about compromise. I’m trying to move from a dualistic world of “two” (polar opposites, right or wrong) to a world of “three” – holding the tension of those opposites, resisting the temptation to resolve it by believing only one side, until something greater – a third element – appears. This is the essence of the Creative Imagination.

But I can’t avoid this one: there is simply no political conflict in which progressives should find themselves aligned so indisputably, so arrogantly, so unconsciously with the interests of Big Business, and indeed of one of the most corrupt of them all, Big Pharma. Forgive me, but I have to say this a third time: almost all the money is on one side of the issue.

And let me say this again as well: it’s not about warring on science. It’s about how science is the religion of the secular. It’s about becoming conscious of how late capitalism’s pathological drive for profits has so corrupted science that it would collude in poisoning three generations of children. It’s about the myth of the killing of the children. It’s about no longer referring to scientists as arbiters until they clean up their act and regain our trust. I’m talking about science that can prove it isn’t bought up by Big Business, science that can return to its basic assumptions and be replicated regularly.

This permission to demonize from the left may well be one of the greatest scams of all. They’ve got some of us shilling for them, on a very slippery slope. They’ve turned some of us into FOX wannabes, more and more comfortable with their nasty, divisive language. And when we start using it we are no longer speaking from our creative imagination, but from our paranoid imagination. 

The present hysteria (whatever it is as you read this) will end soon, because they all do. It’s about our characteristic American predisposition to fall from fear into crusades, retreat behind the pale and sacrifice not only the dreaded Other but our own children. 

It’s not about the fear-du-jour; it’s about our willingness to go there. It’s about how our vaunted rationalism, our sense of fair play and our assumptions of innocence until proven guilty are the thinnest of veneers, below which lie the demons America has avoided looking at for 400 years.

Once the legislation mandating universal vaccination becomes law, will you or I be able to save ourselves (as at Salem, as during the Red Scare, as during McCarthyism and the bogus “war on terror”) by naming names? You can count on this: the next hysteria is already planned, and those who will profit from it expect to count on some of us to use false equivalencies to marginalize alternative thinking. When the call to join the next witch-hunt is sounded, will you have your pitchfork and torch ready?

We are the United States of Amnesia, which is encouraged by a media that has no desire to tell us the truth about anything, serving their corporate masters who have other plans to dominate us. – Gore Vidal

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary is dependent upon him not understanding it. – Upton Sinclair

If you’re taking flak, you’re over the target. – WWII Air Force pilot

For the past several years, liberal conversations have continually floundered on these questions:  How could they – those people – believe all that conspiracy stuff? Don’t they believe in science? I can’t explain the fascination with Trumpus any better than anyone else, but as I’ve written here on QAnon and New Age thinking, for very large numbers of Americans, it began in  rejecting the lies of Big Pharma.

Regardless of how or when Covid ends, who caused it, who has profited, or how many billionaires it has created (over forty), parents of young children still have to address two questions: whom should they trust regarding childhood vaccination, and why do so many well-educated and politically progressive Americans share with conservatives their distrust not only of vaccination but of science in general. Barely half of us completely trust the CDC, and only 37% do so for the NIH or the FDA. I can’t speak for those who’ve swallowed the conservative pill, but I can tell you that for large numbers of us, it’s not about rejecting science but the corruption of science.

Are you feeling manipulated, that you’ve read this far only to be dragged into the vaccination argument? Well, isn’t manipulation the real issue here? Please at least entertain the possibility that for our entire history Americans – all white Americans – by the nature of their mythology, their vast cultural shadow, their collective guilt over the historic crimes against people of color, have been particularly susceptible to hysterias and violent witch-hunts? That they have always been willing to suspend their sacred individualism and give their identity over to the spokespersons of centralized control in the desperate hope that it might push away the nightmares of doubt?

Let’s make three things clear:

1 – To use the terms “anti-vaxxer,” “conspiracy theorist,” “assassination buff,” “9-11 Truther,” etc, is to begin the conversation from the position of the dominators. It is to concede to the colonialist, misogynist or white supremacist who establishes his superiority by determining the language: Injun, my dear girl, nigger, a-rab.

2 – Things are always more complex than either ideological purists or centrists would prefer. As in all political debates, there is a continuum among those who question the vaccination orthodoxy, from those who will not allow their children to receive vaccines under any circumstances, to those who attempt to space out the frequency of vaccination (as my daughter-in-law does), to those who would allow the MMR shot only if the components were given separately, to those who would allow any vaccines if the aluminum adjuvants were removed. These people are not monolithic, and every one of them that I know is a political progressive who hates Trumpus, votes Demo or Green, donates to good causes, marches for peace and has no interest in Alex Jones. So stop the damn FEs and try to listen, because:

3 – Accusations about the “war on science” are yet another form of false equivalency, in which the gatekeepers lump those who question vaccination orthodoxy in the same garbage bin of ignorance as climate deniers.

Again and again: we aren’t talking about whether we believe in science; we’re talking about the corruption of science, especially Medicine, under the pressures of late-stage capitalism.

In 2010, The Atlantic’s David Freeman cited Greek physician John Ioannidis, whose research since the early 1990s has consistently shown that

…much of what biomedical researchers conclude in published studies – conclusions that doctors keep in mind when they prescribe antibiotics or blood-pressure medication… is misleading, exaggerated, and often flat-out wrong. He charges that as much as 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed…the range of errors being committed was astonishing: from what questions researchers posed, to how they set up the studies, to which patients they recruited for the studies, to which measurements they took, to how they analyzed the data, to how they presented their results, to how particular studies came to be published in medical journals.

“The studies were biased,” he says…Researchers headed into their studies wanting certain results – and, lo and behold, they were getting them. We think of the scientific process as being objective, rigorous, and even ruthless in separating out what is true from what we merely wish to be true, but in fact it’s easy to manipulate results…“At every step in the process, there is room to distort results, a way to make a stronger claim or to select what is going to be concluded,” says Ioannidis. “There is an intellectual conflict of interest that pressures researchers to find whatever it is that is most likely to get them funded.”…The great majority collapse under the weight of contradictory data…between a third and a half of the most acclaimed research in medicine was proving untrustworthy…Drug studies have the added corruptive force of financial conflict of interest…The ultimate protection against research error and bias is supposed to come from the way scientists constantly retest each other’s results – except they don’t…even when a research error is outed, it typically persists for years or even decades…similar issues distort research in all fields of science, from physics to economics…

Being wrong in science is fine, and even necessary – as long as scientists recognize that they blew it, report their mistake openly instead of disguising it as a success, and then move on to the next thing, until they come up with the very occasional genuine breakthrough. But as long as careers remain contingent on producing a stream of research that’s dressed up to seem more right than it is, scientists will keep delivering exactly that.

Julian Kirchherr writes:

The idea that the same experiment will always produce the same result, no matter who performs it, is one of the cornerstones of science’s claim to truth. However, more than 70% of the researchers who took part in a recent study…have tried and failed to replicate another scientist’s experiment. Another study found that at least 50% of life science research cannot be replicated. The same holds for 51% of economics papers…the main reason for the spread of fake news in scientific journals is the tremendous pressure in the academic system to publish in high-impact journals…This up-or-out policy encourages scientific misconduct. Fourteen per cent of scientists claim to know a scientist who has fabricated entire datasets, and 72% say they know one who has indulged in other questionable research practices…

And when further research is unable to replicate someone’s initial results, writes Brian Resnick,

…journalists typically only cover those initial papers – and skip over writing about the clarifying meta-reviews that come later on…What’s more, the study finds, journalists “rarely inform the public when [initial studies] are disconfirmed” – despite the fact around half of the studies journalists write about are later rebutted…only 48.7 percent of 156 studies reported by newspapers were confirmed by a subsequent meta-review. The percentage dropped to 34 when the researchers focused on initial studies only.

These accusations have been confirmed by Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, one of the world’s most respected medical journals:

…much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue…Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.

In case you are wondering, I have been fully vaxxed against Covid, and I continue to mask. But we need to talk about corruption that has gone on for so long throughout the scientific community, with such massive expenditures and with correspondingly huge human suffering, that large segments of the population no longer trust medical – and especially pharmacological – authority.

And not trusting one or more sources of authority (Pharma, media, the Catholic Church) opens anyone to the disturbing question of whether they should trust any other sources. In a time when the great myths of western culture are collapsing, it follows that all our institutions are collapsing as well, or at least falling fully under the temptations of profit. That would certainly include academia.

Clifford Conner offers a history of how in the 1960s the overwhelming power of corporate money distorted the ideal of objective research, creating the military-academic-industrial complex. By the Reagan years, Congress had paved the way to corporate ownership of patents derived from taxpayer-funded research, thus transforming public knowledge into private property that could be manipulated for private profit:

Although publicly funded research is monitored by the US Office of Research Integrity, corporate-funded research has no such oversight. Corporate sponsors can therefore freely influence every stage of the process, from the experimental design to the size and focus of studies to the interpretation of their results.

Cui Bono? In the 1960s and 1970s, commercial publishers acquired the best quality medical journals, (previously published by nonprofit academic societies). Now, the flow of published scientific research is regulated by five large medical literature publishing houses that have complete control over the content of medical journals.

Long before Trumpus’ deregulations, both the FDA and the CDC were drowning in accusations of bad science and outright fraud. I’m listing several articles on the corruption of medicine and pharmacology to confirm the background behind the distrust of these institutions – and why they go to such great efforts both to propagandize the public and censor alternative voices, often using false equivalencies. As Caitlin Johnstone writes:

We have two different words for censorship and propaganda, but in reality they’re just different aspects of the same one thing: narrative control. Propaganda is the positive aspect of imperial narrative control (adding communications), censorship the negative (removing communications).

Few of the Pharma-sponsored journals or mainstream media that accept so much Pharma advertising notice when studies are retracted because no one can replicate them. But a group called Retraction Watch has noticed quite a few, 20,000 of them in fact.

Cui Bono? The obscene levels of profits involved (well before Covid) are literally hard to imagine. As far back as 2002, writes Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine,

The combined profits for the ten drug companies in the Fortune 500 ($35.9 billion) were more than the profits for all the other 490 businesses put together ($33.7 billion)…Now primarily a marketing machine to sell drugs of dubious benefit, this industry uses its wealth and power to co-opt every institution that might stand in its way, including the US Congress, the FDA, academic medical centers, and the medical profession itself.

The U.S. and New Zealand are the only countries in the world allowing direct-to-consumer advertising for the pharmaceutical industry, for which they shelled out over $6.5 billion in 2019, and an additional $20 billion for advertising to physicians.

General Articles on the Corruption of Science

Drugmakers Funnel Millions To Lawmakers; A Few Dozen Get $100,000-Plus

Big Pharma Paid Billions in Penalties for Illegal Practices

These Senators Received The Biggest Checks From Pharma Companies

Big Pharma gave thousands to Montana Sen. Steve Daines — while he was writing a law to award them federal funds

CDC director resigns after being caught buying ‘Big Tobacco’ and vaccine maker Merck stock

Selective publication of antidepressant trials and its influence on apparent efficacy 

Major publisher retracts 64 scientific papers in fake peer review outbreak

Transparency Hasn’t Stopped Drug Companies From Corrupting Medical Research 

Big Pharma’s Covid-19 Profiteers

Goldman Sachs asks in biotech research report: ‘Is curing patients a sustainable business model?’ 

FDA “Corruption” Letter Authenticated

A Doctor’s Dilemma: When Crucial New-Drug Data Is Hidden  

Is American Exceptionalism Shaping Our Scientific Response to the Coronavirus? 

BMJ editor Fiona Godlee takes on corruption in science 

Lobbyists Spent Nearly $3.5 Billion in 2020 to Influence Federal Lawmakers

How Big Pharma Pursues ‘Killer Profits’ at Americans’ Expense 

‘Cannot be trusted…causing harm’: Top medical journal takes on big pharma  

How much does Big Pharma pay your doctor?

We Found Over 700 Doctors Who Were Paid More Than a Million Dollars by Drug and Medical Device Companies 

Drugmakers Knew Zantac Caused Cancer But Sold It Anyway for 40 Years

FDA medical adviser: ‘Congress is owned by Pharma’ 

Physician Scientists Fail to Disclose Pharma Conflicts of Interest in Medical Journals 

How drug firms ‘hoodwink’ medical journals

The machinations of the drug industry add up to biased data and staggeringly high prices for consumers 

Why Does the FDA Get Nearly Half Its Funding From the Companies It Regulates? 

The Destruction of Conscience in the National Academy of Sciences 

How the FDA Manipulates the Media (Scientific American) 

Shell and Exxon’s secret 1980s climate change warnings

How Drug Firms ‘Hoodwink’ Medical Journals 

Problems with scientific research (The Economist) 

Big Pharma and Psychology: 69% of the DSM-5 task force members reported financial ties to the drug industry.

—–

Some specific Articles on Corruption in the Vaccination Issue:

Drug companies donated millions to California lawmakers before vaccine debate 

Senator Paid $400,000 By Pharma Pushes Mandatory Vaccine Law 

How Independent Are Vaccine Defenders? (CBS News)

Industry-Sponsored Research: Parallels Between the Vaccine and Tobacco Industry

The situation won’t improve until the profit motive is removed. Progressives — who ought to agree with that statement — would do well to stop ridiculing vaccine skeptics, who often know exactly what they’re talking about, and spend more time lobbying for Medicare-for-All.

Read Part Ten here.

It’s not okay to be a grown adult in 2022 and believe we’re seeing an unprecedented wave of censorship because the European Union, Silicon Valley megacorporations and TV service providers want to protect everyone from “disinformation”. – Caitlin Johnstone

 Belief means not wanting to know what is true. – Friedrich Nietzsche

Centrists and liberals are not the only ones to use the phrase “conspiracy theory” to de-legitimize ideas further out on the spectrum than they are comfortable with. Many progressives, for example, are disappointed with Noam Chomsky, both for ridiculing the 9/11 Truth movement as well as for not questioning the “single gunman” narrative of the Kennedy assassination.

But as always, my greater interest is in considering the mythological implications, because our attitudes, prejudices, ignorance and naiveté are determined by the unconscious ways in which we attend to our American myths. And to do that, we have to look at how the left also engages in false equivalencies. Sorry, no Greek myths here.

Throughout almost all American history, the witch-hunts and hysteria that crop up every generation have mobilized the right wing, especially those males who could be manipulated into identifying as white rather than as working class.

Or at least until after World War Two. Perhaps it began with the fluoridation dispute in the 1950s. It picked up intensity with the political assassinations and blossomed fully after 9-11, when many serious, good-hearted, influential progressives (including Chomsky) demonized some of their brethren who dared to articulate the latest “conspiracy theory.” Later, Tim Wise, a profoundly important activist and writer, exploded in maximal sarcasm:

So please, stay at home 24/7, insisting to yourself and all who will listen about how vaccinations are the cause of autism and how Tower 7 was brought down by Dick Cheney or whatever, and how hyper-oxygenation can cure HIV/AIDS (or at least it would, if HIV/AIDS really existed which it doesn’t of course), and how everything – yes everything – is a “false flag” because Alex Jones said so after skipping his meds for like a month. So there was no Sandy Hook shooting, and no 9/11, and no attack on the Pentagon and all those folks who supposedly died are hanging out on an island like in “Lost” where they are fed and cared for by the NSA and CIA, along with those folks who faked the moon landing and the curvature of the Earth. Oh and while doing this…claim to be a progressive or leftist or radical. Because saying it makes it true!

Tim Wise is a good man who is justifiably angry and extremely articulate within his areas of expertise – racism and white privilege. And I’m not saying that he’s wrong (the broader issue, once again, is not about right and wrong; it’s about innocence and experience.) But look at the language of FE, how he lumps progressives who question certain dominant paradigms that he takes for granted together with right-wing loonies. In his mind they all deserve nothing but ridicule. And I’ve found that his opinions, and worse, his tone, are quite characteristic of countless opinion pieces we’ve all seen in the liberal media. Since the advent of Covid and the Ukraine war, the sarcasm and the circular firing squads have reached pandemic proportions. But we do need to notice when progressives do this.

Ridicule is a tool of the gatekeepers. The Tim Wise quote is too far over the top to characterize “reasonable” (NYT, etc) opinion, but its intention is the same: to marginalize people rather than engage with them.

When did sarcasm ever change anyone’s mind? Is his screed even intended to be read by people who don’t agree with him? This is an important question, since practically all right-wing – and most liberal – rhetoric amounts to nothing more than preaching to one’s choir. It’s the real equivalency of politics and entertainment that we have gradually come to expect from our media.

To use gatekeeping language is to marginalize other people, and in the world of polar opposites, either you are with him on every single issue, or you can’t be trusted on any issue. Change the terminology just a little, and we are back in the language of the American frontier, where you are either among the elect inside the pale of the innocent community, or you represent the dark (ironic, considering Tim’s huge heart on the race issue) evil on the outside that is inscrutable: we just can’t understand why they hate us. And in American myth, evil is so, well, evil that it must be utterly and permanently obliterated and removed from memory. There is no middle ground.

This is the language of a demythologized world, in which subtle nuance (supposedly something that progressives claim to support) has been replaced by dualistic language. However, as I write in Chapter One of my book:

The Aramaic word spoken by Jesus and translated into Greek as diabolos and into English as “evil” actually means “unripe.” What if we used “unripe” instead of “evil?” “Unripe” persons are simply immature. Aren’t communities responsible for helping them “ripen,” rather than punishing or eradicating them?

It’s the language of Fox News. And worse: they want him to sound shrill. It makes their work that much easier. It assists in their broader intentions, to convince more and more of us to simply turn off to the cacophony of bitterness and ranting. Tim Wise is really much better than that.

The language of ridicule reveals how leftists can also engage in FEs. Most of the progressive print and online voices that I read have got on board the “ridicule the anti-vaxxers” train, and in a very specific way. They have bought the gatekeeper line that actually lumps many legitimate anti-corporate, anti-military dissenters together with Tea Party loonies simply because of their common views on vaccination.

This particular smear campaign has succeeded; many progressives seem to view the vaccination issue as just another left/right dispute, and so they no longer need to think about it. If they were experiencing anxiety over this issue (as we all do when our mythic assumptions are called into question), now their anxiety has been reduced. But the myth of American innocence is inherently unstable. Like any other addiction (alcoholism, consumerism, fundamentalism, Marxism, libertarianism, workaholism and our greatest addiction of all, fear), it has very little nutritional capacity and must be constantly fed. But I insist this issue is most certainly not about right and left.

And keep in mind that it was the CIA that coined the phrase, “conspiracy theorist,” and only when it perceived the need to marginalize those who were questioning the official story of the Kennedy assassination.

Why are so many progressives vehemently pro-vaccination and dismissive of alternate thinking on the matter? Perhaps because, as “secular humanists,” their religion is reason or rationality, and its dogma is science. Their world is explained by science rather than by the word of a deity. However, as with all dying mythologies, once a single facet of the dogma is questioned or shown to be imperfect, the entire theology is also called into question. The fear of such a chaotic universe is so strong that it overrides the strong evidence of both the massive corruption of science that is as strong as the corruption of the Catholic Church as well as the fact that many vaccine skeptics (all the ones I know) are not universally opposed to vaccines, only to the ones (or the combinations) they consider dangerous.

Indeed, perhaps many progressives refuse to let go of the belief in progress itself, which inevitably assumes the necessity of perpetual economic growth – on a planet that is rapidly approaching terminal limits and a collapsing ecosystem. Belief in progress conflicts with all our environmental concerns.

Perhaps progressives should agree on a different term to describe ourselves.

What to believe? How do we explain that many who question the dominant narrative on the Kennedy assassinations and 9-11 are right-wingers, just as many progressives refuse to get vaccinated and countless New Age people continue to support Trumpus? I’m less interested in answering these questions and more interested in pursuing the issue of belief itself, as I do in another series. As I write in Chapter One of my book,

Since monotheism rejects ambiguity and diversity, it requires belief, which implies not merely a single set of truths but also the obligation to convert – or eliminate – others. It invites misogyny, aggression, hatred of the body and a single creation myth.

Are you a believer – in religion or in science (a better term in this context would be scientism)? I’m reminded of those many examples of virulent anti-Catholics and anti-Communists who had previously been extreme believers in those causes. Switching from pro- to anti-, they may have simply turned the sights of their addictive personalities onto different targets. Charles Eisenstein writes:

To leap from one certainty to another skips the holy ground of uncertainty, of not knowing, of humility, into which genuinely new information can come. What unites the pundits of all persuasions is their certainty. Who is trustworthy? In the end, it is the person with the humility to recognize when he or she has been wrong.

Or, as Caroline Casey says, believe nothing; entertain possibilities.

Read Part Nine here.

Who Checks the Fact Checkers?

I will never apologize for the United States of America. I don’t care what the facts are.  – George H.W. Bush

You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test. – George W. Bush

So how do we know what’s fake and what isn’t? Fact checkers to the rescue! Nothing makes us feel more part of the chosen community – than to know the truth about things, to have our sense of the real confirmed by others.

For years, the only fact-checker most people knew about was Snopes.com. Many writers, however, have accused it of being not only biased but as being a shill for Big Pharma. And allegedly it is 50% owned by an advertising agency.

The national media understand how confused Americans are (partially because for decades they had such a hand in confusing us), and they want to help us sort the real (their real) from the fake. So they have provided us with authoritative sources to know what is real. However, as we’ll see, the actual agenda of many of these “objective” voices is to bestow quasi-academic reinforcement to the marginalization of progressive opinion through the same process of making false equivalencies.

As soon as we start to look up some of these sources, we confront the basic problem. In every case, someone or some group is telling us who to trust. In other words, they begin by establishing themselves as gatekeepers, in your interest, of course. Some of them have complied lists of the “best” fact-checkers, like this and this.

 Indeed, an “International Fact-Checking Network” lays claim to being the ultimate fact-checker of all the other fact-checkers. It is, however, a project of the Poynter Institute (which also owns Politifact), of which  Bill Gates and Charles Koch are major funders. The Columbia Journalism Review notes that the Gates Foundation has given more than $250 million toward journalism.

Recipients included news operations like the BBC, NBC, Al Jazeera, ProPublica, National Journal, The Guardian, Univision, Medium, the Financial Times, The Atlantic, the Texas Tribune, Gannett, Washington Monthly, Le Monde, and the Center for Investigative Reporting; charitable organizations affiliated with news outlets, like BBC Media Action and the New York Times’ Neediest Cases Fund; media companies such as Participant, whose documentary Waiting for “Superman” supports Gates’s agenda on charter schools; journalistic organizations such as the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the National Press Foundation, and the International Center for Journalists; and a variety of other groups creating news content or working on journalism, such as the Leo Burnett Company, an ad agency that Gates commissioned to create a “news site” to promote the success of aid groups. In some cases, recipients say they distributed part of the funding as subgrants to other journalistic organizations—which makes it difficult to see the full picture of Gates’s funding into the fourth estate.

Regardless of what we may think of Gates, a blogger who posted this information on Facebook claims he quickly received 1,000 likes. Soon after, Facebook removed it.

It really shouldn’t surprise us that fact checkers serving major websites have their own agendas. One of Facebook’s fact checkers, for example, is checkyourfact, which is an affiliate of The Daily Caller, a “news” outlet co-founded by Tucker Carlson.  As I mentioned above, FB also works with the Atlantic Council,  and Harvard University uses “PropOrNot”. Derrick Broze writes:

The strategy for the social media companies and fact checkers is simple: label someone fake news, lower their reach with algorithmic manipulation, force them to comply to arbitrary commands if they want the fake news label removed, control the narrative and shape the conversation…Unfortunately, the censors are winning because many in the alternative media are choosing to self-censor in the hopes that things will get better in the long run or that doing so will allow them to stay on the platform longer, and continue to reach more people.

Perhaps the worst of the lot is Newsguard (“Fighting misinformation with journalism – not algorithms”). This for-profit firm helps students with its “nutrition label” reviews, promotes an “Internet Trust Tool” to libraries and markets these services to advertisers as tools to protect their “brand safety.” It also partners with Microsoft’s Edge Mobile Browser for IOS to warn Android and Chrome users about fake news generated by untrustworthy news sites.

However, many of Newsguard’s partners and investors are linked to the military, intelligence, media and political establishments and to corporate marketers. Caitlin Johnstone writes:

NewsGuard’s advisory board reads like the fellowships list of a neocon think tank, and indeed one of its CEOs, Louis Gordon Crovitz, is a Council on Foreign Relations member who has worked with the American Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation. Members of the advisory board include George W Bush’s Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, deep intelligence community insider Michael Hayden…

Andy Lee Roth and Mickey Huff of Project Censored (a group I personally recommend), add:

Instead of simply promoting a well-informed public, NewsGuard and its ilk stand poised to wield whatever authority they are granted to promote narrow ideological perspectives and corporate economic interests that reflect the world views of powerful institutions such as Homeland Security, NATO, the CIA, AT&T and Microsoft.

Another of FB’s fact checkers is Lead Stories, which is funded by a company that has been accused of censorship on behalf of the Chinese government.

And now for some comic relief. Literally anybody (with significant financial backing) can proclaim themselves “a trusted arbiter of investigative news,” as does right-wing RealClearInvestigations, which mirrors everything I’ve been saying with: “The Troubling Fact Is That the Media’s Fact-Checkers Tend to Lean ← Left”.

What can we conclude about all this? Just as no savior is going to descend from above and solve all our problems, no self-proclaimed fact checker is likely to transcend their prejudices, whether honest or corporately-imposed, and tell us what’s objectively true. It’s up to all of us to build and teach media literacy.

Perhaps part of our problem is whether there is any possibility of knowing “The Truth”. That’s a philosophical conundrum we don’t have space for here.

Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it. – Andre Gide

I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of the imagination. – John Keats

But some things – some facts – exist right in front of us, and the only thing that keeps us from seeing them clearly are our own mythologies of privilege and innocence.

I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty to know what occurs but not recognize the fact. – William Stafford

For now, it’s really pretty simple. Roth and Huff suggest

A robust independent press – grounded in core values of journalism, including independence, accountability and transparency – provides a first line of defense. And the positive impact of independent journalism can be multiplied exponentially by education efforts that foster widespread critical media literacy among the public.

They offer four simple writing guidelines from the Society of Professional Journalists:

(1) Seek Truth and Report It

(2) Minimize Harm

(3) Act Independently

(4) Be Accountable and Transparent

Johnstone keeps it even simpler. When you strip away all the empty fluff and manipulative spin, there are basically only four questions that really matter:

(1) where the money is going,

(2) where the resources are going,

(3) where the weapons are going, and

(4) where the people are going.

When it comes to understanding world dynamics, accurate information about these four items is the only real news. Everything else is empty narrative spin meant to justify, distort, or distract. And as far as most of these “fact checkers” are concerned, much of it takes the form of false equivalencies.

Read Part Eight here.

Social Media

We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist. – James Baldwin

I’d agree with you, but then we’d both be wrong. – Kenny Ausubel

Throughout social media we see the use of false equivalencies to drape the mantel of “outside the pale” onto progressive writers by associating them with right-wingers.

Caitlin Johnstone argues that when there is no meaningful separation between corporate power and state power, corporate censorship is state censorship. In 2016, she reports,

…representatives of Facebook, Twitter, and Google were instructed on the US Senate floor that it is their responsibility to “quell information rebellions” and adopt a “mission statement” expressing their commitment to “prevent the fomenting of discord…We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations and easily transform us into the Divided States of America.”

Regardless of what, sadly, is going on in Ukraine as I write this, and what opinions about it we are offered, the problem for Americans is that most of our information is squeezed through a very narrow mainstream social media lens that has prepared us emotionally and instructed us how to think about this war. Back in 2017, Robert Parry wrote:

…I cannot think of a single prominent figure in the mainstream news media who questions any claim – no matter how unlikely or absurd – that vilifies Russian President Vladimir Putin and his country…And, behind this disturbing anti-Russian uniformity are increasing assaults against independent and dissident journalists and news outlets outside the mainstream.

He observed that the Justice Department, with very specious argument, had demanded that the Russian news outlet, RT, register as a foreign agent:

This attack on RT was rationalized by the Jan. 6 (2016) “Intelligence Community Assessment” that was, in reality, prepared by a handful of “hand-picked” analysts from the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency…However, if any real journalist actually read the Jan. 6 report, he or she would have discovered that RT’s sinister assault on American democracy included such offenses as holding a debate among third-party candidates who were excluded from the Republican-Democratic debates in 2012…reporting on the Occupy Wall Street protests and examining the environmental dangers from “fracking,” issues that also have been widely covered by the domestic American media. Apparently, whenever RT covers a newsworthy event – even if others have too – that constitutes “propaganda,” which must be throttled to protect the American people from the danger of seeing it…The U.S. government’s real beef with RT seems to be that it allows on air some Americans who have been blacklisted from the mainstream media – including highly credentialed former U.S. intelligence analysts …because they have challenged various Official Narratives.

“…to protect the American people from the danger of seeing it.” Once again, the reasoning seems to be that citizens can no longer be trusted (by whom?) to ingest competing opinions and make intelligent decisions. This is authoritarianism at worst and patronizing at best. But it really introduces a profoundly mythic issue. In Chapter Ten of my book I repeatedly ask the rhetorical question, What are they so afraid of? Fear of the outsider was nurtured through the deliberate creation of an image. For four decades J. Edgar Hoover described those who threatened the status quo as “outside agitators,” regardless of their nationality.

This almost poetic image of the Dionysian menace implies three assumptions about the polis. The first is innocence: evil comes from abroad. It implies that communist ideas couldn’t possibly originate here. Terrorism, quips Chomsky, is “what others do to us.”

A second assumption is weakness. Just as youths seemingly cannot resist drugs or sex, the polis can entertain only the mildest diversity of opinion. If allowed access to the children, communists would prevent discrimination of right from wrong and infect the national immune system with their “agit-prop.”

A third assumption about us is fairness. Pentheus, who would attack directly, throws fastballs, while Dionysus throws curves. The terrorist could be a friend or co-worker. He is urban, possibly Jewish. He infects us through trickery rather than through direct, “manly” confrontation. And since he refuses to play by our rules, we are justified in our righteous and overpowering vengeance.

Now, the actual purpose of social media’s censoring of “fake News” is to shut down real debate and purge writers critical of the American empire – all under the guise of “fairness”. I’ll move from the least consequential to the most influential platforms. Some of these examples are clearly of FEs, while others exhibit the kind of censorship that FEs produce. How do we know what’s real? I don’t really know, but we can read about how our primary electronic gatekeepers are collaborating with government to narrow the window of acceptable debate and come to our own conclusions.

Airbnb is preventing Palestinian hosts from listing their homes in the occupied West Bank

Digital marketer Mailchimp bans anti-vaccination content

YouTube, Zoom and Facebook censor Leila Khaled for Israel

Zoom censors events about Zoom censorship

Paypal is falsely equating non-violent anti-Zionist activism with anti-Semitic terrorism. It has refused to provide services to Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation and has shut down the accounts of some Palestine solidarity groups without providing an explanation. Why? Apparently because 20 human rights organizations were placed on a blacklist by Israeli authorities. Indeed, according to Ali Abunimah, Paypal has censored journalists who criticize Israel: “An operative of Israel’s global censorship campaign has admitted to exaggerating claims of anti-Semitism in order to engineer crackdowns on supporters of Palestinian rights”.

On the other end of the FE spectrum, Paypal and other payment processors repeatedly promised to prevent white nationalists from raising money online. But a year after the deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, several openly racist groups were still using mainstream payment providers to process credit card payments and crowdfund their efforts.

Music platforms

Censoring of pro-Palestinian views has also happened at Apple Music,  Spotify and YouTube.

I posted an earlier version of this essay in 2018, and it was clear at that time (pre-Covid, pre-QAnon, pre-Ukraine) that the gatekeepers of social media had been hard at work for years at marginalizing progressives through FEs. Now, in the spring of 2022, it seems to me that, even with Internet access, Americans are being subjected to more censorship and propaganda than at any time since the McCarthy era of the early 1950s.

YouTube has deleted over 1,000 channels and 15,000 videos in its new enforcement of “Community Guidelines” since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Most ominously, this list includes Pulitzer Prize-winner Chris Hedges and his entire, six-year archive of author interviews, not one of which was about Russia. His response:

This censorship is about supporting what, as I.F Stone reminded us, governments always do – lie. Challenge the official lie, as I often did, and you will soon become a nonperson on digital media. Julian Assange and Edward Snowden exposed the truth about the criminal inner workings of power.  Look where they are now. This censorship is one step removed from Joseph Stalin’s airbrushing of nonpersons such as Leon Trotsky out of official photographs. It is a destruction of our collective memory…The goal is to foster historical amnesia. If we don’t know what happened in the past, we cannot make sense of the present.

In March RT was forced to shut down. One of its progressive voices is anti-war comedian Lee Camp, whose TV show had argued that the U.S. provoked Russia into attacking Ukraine. Camp may have been consoled because at least he had a huge, eight-year presence on YouTube, with literally thousands of videos posted and 240,000 subscribers – at least until mid-March, when YouTube, which had already banned Trumpus and (some) other hate-mongers, suddenly and permanently banned his channel.

Here’s the FE logic:

Russia invades Ukraine, unprovoked; Putin bad.

Trumpus praises Putin; Trumpus bad; Social media bans Trumpus.

Progressives show evidence of provocation by U. S.

MSM associates progressives with Russia; progressives bad.

Social media now has another excuse to de-platform other progressives.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is actively censored, and users are blocked not only for reasons of spam and vandalism.

Wikipedia’s Culture of Editorial Chaos and Malice

How a Small Group of Pro-Israel Activists Blacklisted MintPress on Wikipedia 

Facebook, Axios And NBC Paid This Guy To Whitewash Wikipedia Pages

Twitter

Twitter uses censorship-by-algorithm. Its Australian content moderator is a government-funded right-wing think tank. It actually admits Algorithm Bias for rightwing politicians and news outlets.

It has placed warnings labels on all Russia-backed media, delivering a pop-up message warning readers not to share or even ‘like’ a post linking to such outlets. It has also placed the label “Russia state-affiliated media” on every tweet made by the personal accounts of employees of those platforms, baselessly giving the impression that these opinions are paid Kremlin content.

Twitter Suspends Accounts For Propaganda, Has Literal Propagandist As High-Level Executive

Top Assange Defense Account Deleted By Twitter

Facebook and Twitter delete large amounts of Palestinian content 

As Twitter falsely labels more and more progressive voices as “Russian State-Affliated Media”, it’s hard to argue with Johnstone’s claim that Twitter IS “State-affiliated media”. 

Google

Let us not forget that Google is literally in the business of controlling what viewers see and delivering them to advertisers. Its origin partly lies in CIA and NSA research grants for mass surveillance. Already, back in 2017, it was planning to “de-rank” Russia Today and Sputnik to combat misinformation, despite the fact that its own internal review system found that they had broken no rules, and it did this to many other progressive websites.

What does “de-ranking” on the Google news feed mean? The new algorithms moved these websites from previously prominent positions to positions up to 50 search result pages from the first page, essentially removing them from the search results most of us see.

This is classic false equivalency. And, we must admit, rather brilliant. Google can legitimately claim that it doesn’t censor progressive voices! You can always find their links — if you’re willing to skip through fifty of its pages. It has clearly used concerns about Trumpus-leaning fake news as a cover to suppress opinions from socialist, antiwar or left-wing websites, including AlterNet, Truthdig, Global Research, Democracy Now, American Civil liberties Union, Wikileaks, Chris Hedges, Counterpunch and Consortium News.

In 2017, for example, the World Socialist Web Site reported that traffic coming in from web search was down 70 percent. It claimed that In mid-April, a Google search for “socialism vs. capitalism” brought one of the site’s links on the first results page but, by August, that same search didn’t feature any of its links and that 145 of the top 150 search terms that had previously redirected people to the site were now devoid of its links. Even the NYT took note of (or bragged about) this.

World Socialist went further. It obtained statistical data estimating the decline of traffic generated by Google searches for 13 sites with substantial readerships:

* wsws.org fell by 67 percent
* alternet.org fell by 63 percent
* globalresearch.ca fell by 62 percent
* consortiumnews.com fell by 47 percent
* socialistworker.org fell by 47 percent
* mediamatters.org fell by 42 percent
* commondreams.org fell by 37 percent
* internationalviewpoint.org fell by 36 percent
* democracynow.org fell by 36 percent
* wikileaks.org fell by 30 percent
* truth-out.org fell by 25 percent
* counterpunch.org fell by 21 percent
* theintercept.com fell by 19 percent

By August of 2018 (again, long before Covid or the Ukraine war), it seemed that public pressure had led Google to relent – at least for a while. C. J. Hopkins wrote:

What’s happening isn’t censorship, technically, at least not in the majority of cases…This isn’t Czechoslovakia, after all. This is global capitalism, where the repression of dissent is a little more subtle. The point of Google “unpersoning” CounterPunch…is not to prevent them from publishing their work or otherwise render them invisible to readers. The goal is to delegitmize them, and thus decrease traffic to their websites and articles, and ultimately drive them out of business…Another objective of this non-censorship censorship is discouraging writers like myself from contributing to publications…(that) the corporatocracy deems “illegitimate.” Google unpersoning a writer like (Chris) Hedges is a message to other non-ball-playing writers…“This could happen to you.”

But when Trumpus accused Google of “rigged” search results to showcase too many liberal media outlets and too few “Republic/Conservative (Sic) & Fair Media” sites, he made it even easier for the company’s gatekeepers to use FE tactics against the left.

Facebook

Facebook (Meta) has, quite deservedly, become the focal point for all that’s wrong with social media.

It has regularly used FEs as an excuse to purge progressive voices, using Republican political operatives and an Israeli censorship expert. One of its fact checkers has ties to a news outlet that promotes climate doubt. It allows governments to decide what to censor,  punishes Black people for talking about racism and deliberately targets Palestinian accounts. In 2017 Glenn Greenwald described meetings between Facebook and Israeli officials:

…its failure to voluntarily comply with Israeli deletion orders would result in the enactment of laws requiring Facebook to do so, upon pain of being severely fined or even blocked in the country…Ever since, Facebook has been on a censorship rampage against Palestinian activists…Indeed, Israeli officials have been publicly boasting about how obedient Facebook is when it comes to Israeli censorship orders…Needless to say, Israelis have virtually free rein to post whatever they want about Palestinians. Calls by Israelis for the killing of Palestinians are commonplace on Facebook, and largely remain undisturbed.

FB has been dishonest in its public statements about the classic false equivalency “anti-Zionist = anti-Semitism”.

When it comes to Facebook ‘incitement,’ only Palestinians are arrested, not Jewish Israelis

But FB’s mendacity (and collusion with the empire) has gone well beyond that issue. It approved right-wing news outlet The Weekly Standard as a fact checker. Having banned Infowars for thirty days (thirty days!), it went on to permanently shut down all manner of progressive accounts (including me!), claiming that they “…sought to inflame social and political tensions in the United States, and…their activity was similar…to that of Russian accounts during the 2016 election.” Matt Taibbi writes:

Facebook was “helped” in its efforts to wipe out these dangerous memes by the Atlantic Council, on whose board you’ll find confidence-inspiring names like Henry Kissinger, former CIA chief Michael Hayden, former acting CIA head Michael Morell and former Bush-era Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff. (The latter is the guy who used to bring you the insane color-coded terror threat level system.)…As noted in Rolling Stone earlier this year, 70 percent of Americans get their news from just two sources, Facebook and Google. As that number rises, the power of just a few people to decide what information does and does not reach the public will amplify significantly.

In 2018 FB removed police accountability pages, and in 2020 it purged several anarchist accounts without warning, some of which were associated with the antifascist movement.   These included It’s Going Down, a widely followed news and media platform that currently produces a radio show on Pacifica.

It gets worse. Even as FB uses FEs to block legitimate progressive postings, many are accusing it of allowing real hate speech to remain.  An investigative journalist who went undercover as a FB moderator in Ireland reported that it lets pages from far-right fringe groups exceed the deletion threshold, and that those pages are “subject to different treatment in the same category as pages belonging to governments and news organizations.” The accusation undermines FB’s claims that it is actively trying to cut down on fake news and hate speech.

Well, these revelations certainly shouldn’t surprise students of the long-term, well-documented collusion between American media and the national security state. Social media are now bigger and more influential than newspapers, and the money involved (cui bono – follow the money) is correspondingly greater. Nor should we be surprised when the NYT cheers on these efforts to censor alternative opinion through the use of FE algorithms.

Now in 2022, it is allowing posts calling for violence against Russians and calls for Putin’s death, while continuing to silence Israel’s critics. Much of these false equivalencies are about the erasure of memory and the cancelling of what we see with our own eyes. Taibbi observes:

… we long ago reached the doublethink phase predicted by Orwell, where most of the population is conscious of double standards but ignores them effortlessly. A healthy person should be…horrified by what’s happening in Russia and also see a warning about the degradation that ensues from using “pre-emptive” force, or from trying to control discontent by erasing expressions of it. But years of relentless propaganda have trained Americans to doublethink their way out of such insights…We’re being driven faster toward the cliff-edge of this moral insanity with each new act of mass forgetting…The Trump-Russia scandal blotted out Snowden, made the spooks the good guys again…We’re at the end of a twenty-year cycle that has taken what was once the oppositional-skeptic portion of the American population and seen them rallied behind the people they once hated the most. This has been accomplished by keeping us in a rage that always escalates and is never watered down by contradictions, thanks to mastery of “reality control” via “an unending series of victories over your own memory.”…even when there’s real fighting going on in a faraway land, the real target is always the domestic population, whose memories and doubts and distracting emotional attachments are the real threats and must be constantly policed.

The real target is always the domestic population.

The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact…The war is not meant to be won; it is meant to be continuous. – George Orwell

How successful have these efforts been to make left and right equivalent – and to purge both, but mostly the left – in the minds of innocent liberals? Well before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, more Americans were approving of steps to restrict false information online.

And Democrats were approving of the CIA and the FBI more than Republicans were, and by stunningly large margins. 

Read Part Seven here.

In America the majority erects a formidable barrier around thought. Within its limits, a writer is free but woe to him who dares to go beyond…When you go among your fellows, they will shun you as an impure being, and even those who believe in your innocence will abandon you for fear the others will shun them as well. – Alexis de Tocqueville

Whether they are uttered by obvious clowns on Fox News or by respectable, mainstream pundits, false equivalencies typically function to marginalize progressive alternatives when actual counter-arguments to them would be unconvincing. Here’s the logic:

A is the moderate opinion acceptable to those in power.

B is a progressive alternative, which gatekeepers initially ignore.

C is a loony, almost deliberately comic or outright hateful right wing conspiracy theory.

Eventually, the public (despite the media embargo) forces the gatekeepers to address B.

When they can no longer ignore B, they attack it.

When criticism proves ineffective, they resort to equating B with C.

Here’s another one:

Russia invades Ukraine. Putin bad.

Trumpus praises Russia. Trumpus bad.

We hate Trumpus. We good.

Progressives criticize U.S. provocation of Russia.

Media: Progressives = Trumpus = Putin propagandists.

Media: Progressives should be de-platformed from social media.

Another related issue is the FE of strictly non-violent movements for racial justice with a vicious white supremacist reaction, often expressed by police murders of unarmed people of color. Fortune Magazine, hardly a raving commie rag, reported that in 2017, firearm-related killings of police officers actually declined from 2016. And police, according to the same statistics, are more likely to kill themselves than be killed by a criminal. 2017 was actually one of the safest years in decades for on-duty police officers. (2017, however, also marked the third year in a row in which police killed around 1,000 Americans, in a trend that has continued through 2021.)

“Blue lives Matter”

How then do we explain the fact that in the first two months of that same year, lawmakers in 14 states introduced 32 “Blue Lives Matter” bills proposing that police be included in hate crime protections, except by understanding the phenomena of FEs? Or that in May 2018 an overwhelming majority of the House passed the “Protect and Serve Act of 2018,”  which mandates harsher penalties for people who commit violence against police than for those who hurt civilians?

The Senate’s version of the bill went even further, making police a “protected class.” From whom? For years the FBI had been conjuring yet another category of victim using yet another FE: “Black Identity Extremists”, claiming that nonviolent anti-racists, like actual racists, may be terrorists. Several state laws now equate the degree of melatonin in one’s skin with an occupation. Now, an unarmed black teenager and a heavily armed white cop are “equally” potential victims.

And when enough of the public becomes normalized to the idea that white supremacists and anti-fascists are merely two faces of the same coin, it becomes easier for police to cooperate with the former and further their actual agenda of persecuting the latter.

By 2019, the FBI was ranking “Black Identity Extremists’ as a bigger threat than Al Queda  and targeting Ferguson Black Activists over White supremacists. And CBS News claimed that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the “Sarah Palin of the Left”.

FEs have stalked the conversation about racial justice for decades, from the old distractor that “Africans enslaved each other, so therefore American slavery wasn’t so bad” to the deliberately confusing claims that “most Blacks are killed by other Blacks” to Trumpus’ crusade against “white genocide” in South Africa. 

Truthers

So what about the “9-11 Truthers,” (they, of course, don’t use that term, nor (at least before Covid) did vaccination sceptics call themselves “anti-vaxxers”), whom the gatekeepers have been equating with the looniest of Obama haters (Kenya, socialist, Muslim, etc) for years? The issue here is not about veracity, but about how the media marginalizes those who question the motives of the empire and the myth of American innocence. It’s also about how the passage of time gradually takes the energy out of the reactionary response.

In 2014 a group called Rethink911 put up large advertisements in eleven cities about Building Seven, the third high rise that fell on 9/11, the one that had not been hit by the planes. It was too big an event to ignore, so Time reported it with a typical headline: “Sept. 11 ‘Truthers’ Mark Anniversary.” It would seem, however, that thirteen years after the event, it was now permissible for the actual text of the article to be surprisingly objective and free of the usual ridicule.  Six months later, writes Elizabeth Woodworth,

…20 stories in major papers have covered the September-December 2013 ReThink911 campaign – including Time Magazine, the NYT, the Ottawa Citizen, and BBC News Magazine…As time passes our memories of 9/11 becomes less painful and more open to public discussion. There is increasing skepticism in both the social and corporate media about the credibility of 9/11 as the foundation for the continuing global war on terror…seven congressmen, backed by impacted 9/11 families, are calling for the release of a secret 2002 congressional study that implicates Saudi Arabia in financing the alleged hijackers.

Four years later, the venerable gatekeeper Newsweek, with surprising objectivity, reviewed a new book that claimed, “CIA and Saudi Arabia Conspired to keep 9/11 details secret.” 

Again, I’m not trying to provoke a fight about the truth, but to examine how the gatekeepers do what they do, how they plant their flags in the “moderate center” and how they convince educated people to stop thinking – or at least until the passage of time softens the import of certain events.

Then we have the question of who is “fair and balanced,” as Fox News once described itself (significantly, they don’t any longer).  Of course, most journals of opinion have always claimed to offer opposing points of view in order to flesh out the finer points of an issue. This is what the free press is supposed to be about. In fact, beginning in 1949, the Fairness Doctrine of the Federal Communications Commission required this of all holders of broadcast licenses. Ronald Reagan revoked it in 1987 and it was removed from the Federal Register in 2011 by – yes – Barack Obama. 

Now neither Fox (the house organ of the Republicans) nor MSNBC (ditto for the Democrats) is required to maintain the pretense of balanced reporting. But when we look at “serious” journals that do claim to do so, once again we find the common use of FEs. Was it a search for “fairness” that made The Atlantic and CNN give space and airtime to outright racists in 2018, or for CBS News to hire the horrid Mike Mulvaney in 2022?

These are all examples of the tightening of the “Overton Window”. If war criminals and white supremacists occupy the middle, anyone to the left of them is automatically banished — quite literally, as we’ll see.

Do their “Russia-Gate” attacks on Trumpus that lack any criticism of the military-industrial complex justify the promotion of men who advocate waterboarding, hanging women who have had abortions and killing reporters? Why do they try to convince us that the career criminals of the FBI, CIA and the military are any more honorable than Trumpus himself? Apparently because they can.

Palestine

For decades, media coverage of Israel and Palestine has been a litany of FEs, such as the patently false claim that to be anti-Zionist is to be anti-Semitic.  Another is the “dueling narratives” story, which laments the impossibility of any long-term solution because there has always been “violence on both sides,” such as here and here.

Once that is assumed, the next FE is to make the absurd argument of equivalence between the degrees of power and the levels of violence committed by the two sides. But to do that, the gatekeepers must utterly ignore the Geneva Convention definition that collective punishment – precisely what Israel regularly inflicts upon the population of Gaza and the West Bank – is a war crime.

The NYT also regularly makes the false equivalence of anti-Zionists with white nationalists and allows Israeli officials to call BDS activists ‘enemy soldiers’ and compare them to Nazis. 

Partially because of the unrelenting barrage of FEs led by the Times, the FBI has relied on unvetted, right-wing blacklists to surveil and harass anti-Zionist activists, and Congress has repeatedly considered an “Anti-Semitism Awareness Act” that would severely limit free speech.

The Israel / Palestine dispute has been a long-term issue on university campuses, and it has become another arena of FEs, since there is little coverage of the huge discrepancy in funding between the two sides,  or on the fact that many academics have been fired and/or blacklisted for their pro-Palestinian – yet anti-violence – positions, including Norman Finkelstein and Steven Salaita. Hence the perceived need for FEs. And since the media can choose what to emphasize and whom to equalize, they can also police the voices who don’t police themselves, as when CNN fired Marc Lamont Hill for defending Palestinian rights.

Why has there been such a long-term barrage of pro-Israel propaganda and gatekeeping? Certainly, world opinion has long favored the Palestinians. And even in the U.S., polls have shown that Democrats, especially younger voters, have begun to stray from one of the most foundational stances of the American Empire, the notion that liberals must support Israel without question. In a world where Israeli bombers destroy Palestinian children and snipers assassinate Palestinian medics inside the concentration camp known as Gaza, people are waking up and questioning the imperative to be PEPs (progressives except for Palestine).

Read Part Six here.

I don’t say that you’re self-censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is, if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you are sitting. – Noam Chomsky

Trumpus’ bellowing about fake news implies that the media lies about him and his policies. Well, of course they offer very selective versions of the news all the time. Newspapers have always been partisan, often quite openly. Only three generations ago, every major city in the U.S. (and still now, in most European, Asian and Latin American countries) had several dailies, with some clearly favoring the working class, even being proudly socialist, and others being the “papers of record” that fed carefully edited — and vetted  — opinion masquerading as news to the middle and upper classes.

But even the working-class papers, if pro-union, often were nativist, racist and pro-war. And, with the media consolidation of the past fifty years – and willing cooperation with the national security establishment – the differences have diminished further.

In this sense, American media have been “fake” for over a hundred years, consistently playing two alternating and contradictory roles. On the one hand, they have terrorized us about the latest threats (fear of communism shifting smoothly to Islamophobia precisely when the Soviet Union collapsed, then Iran, and back to the Russians and Chinese in the past decade), all of them requiring massive expansion of the military-industrial state. On the other, they have assured us with Disneyesque sweetness and full-page consumer advertising that everything is quite all right, that the cost-free consumer paradise of our dreams has been right around the corner, if only government would get off our backs. This is long-term crazy-making, or schizogenetic, behavior. 

There have been exceptions, but the historical evidence is so overwhelming that we can assume a basic rule: war is highly profitable. As far back as the invasion of Mexico in 1846 the major media and their gatekeepers have lied to push the nation into war at every opportunity. Some have expressed regret, long after the fact, but that is the fact. But we’re talking about something new. Now we’re talking about the collapse of American myth in our time, and the intended effects of FEs. So we must return to academia.

2021 was the year in which reactionaries across the country got serious about banning books. But it was in 2017 that liberal Harvard University established a large list of online publications, tagging them as “fake”.  The list was based primarily on the recommendations of an anonymous and obviously right-wing group called “PropOrNot”  that blacklisted over 200 websites as agents or assets of the Russian state.  The “Harvard Index” established a new normal, a guideline to colleges and universities, regarding what students and researchers should not trust or even read.

Consider the implications of those last three words. The cream of the crop, students at elite universities, are now being told that they are so uninformed (un-formed), so untrustworthy, so impressionable, so utterly unable to form their own conclusions, that Mother Harvard, like the cultural guardians of McCarthyism, like the Catholic Church, doesn’t even want them to be exposed to this stuff.

It gets worse. Apparently, Harvard’s gatekeepers established their list without reading most of the alleged fake online publications. It was a massive and utterly unscientific attack upon virtually the entire spectrum of alternative media, including thousands of authors and dozens of news organizations which would now be categorized not only as unreliable but even as conspiracy theorists.

It was one of the most egregious examples of false equivalency, listing quite legitimate investigative researchers and sites in the same breathless list as Alex Jones and other rabidly misogynistic, white supremacist, anti-immigrant and outright Nazi publications. It had the authority of Harvard, it went out to hundreds of schools, and it led readers to believe that nothing to the right or left of the major gatekeeping media should be consumed. The WAPO and other corporate media then cited this index repeatedly in circular logic: one of the fact-checking sources that Harvard used was the WAPO.

FEs turn up in all kinds of public discourses, such as “competing victimhood.” A privileged group argues that another group shouldn’t demand special attention from government because, they, the first group, had also been treated badly but had prospered nonetheless. For example, large numbers of Irish were brought to the New World as indentured servants. But claiming an “equality of suffering” between enslaved Africans and indentured Europeans has no other effect than to perpetuate white supremacy. Indeed, writes Liam Hogan, Trump supporters in North Carolina told a reporter for TIME Magazine that “Irish slaves had it worse than African slaves.” The “myth of Irish slavery” became a favorite far-right meme.

A trivial example, you might say. But it is not unrelated to a much more important one, the issue of electoral fraud and fake voters, which Trumpus raised even before the 2016 election (and obviously, four years later), making the ludicrous claim that three-five million illegal voters had cost him the popular vote. It was, and continues to be, a smokescreen for the profoundly important reality of Republican voter suppression. But it fed directly into the bizarre condition that his supporters, despite their “victory,” still considered themselves to be victims of the deep state. By July of 2018, even ABC News was willing to report that Republican-run states had purged 16 million voters in the three years prior to the election.

Some six million others, at least a third of them African-American, have been disenfranchised and banned entirely from voting, usually because they are ex-felons. This fact, along with voter suppression and hacking of voting machines (not by Russians but by Republican secretaries of state in at least 20 states) far outweighs any other factors in the contemporary political situation. There is, of course, no evidence of millions of anti-Trumpus fake votes, but the repeated charges help to deflect public opinion from the actual situation.

This may be the most egregious use of FEs – and the most hidden – that we need to understand. Of course, the Democrats didn’t steal the 2020 election. However, any time you see or read some liberal pundit lecture that the vote (or any Presidential vote since at least the year 2000) was “fair”, please understand that, deliberately or not, he is reinforcing a massive denial of the most critical political fact of the 21^st century. From gerrymandering to voter suppression to computer-machine fraud, the Republicans have stolen all these elections at every level from local to national, even when Democrats have taken the Presidency.

Similarly, for a few years many centrists made a cottage industry of arguments that equated the origin, influence and popularity of the two pre-Trumpus “populist” movements: Occupy and the Tea Party. Typically, however, they ignored the vastly unequal treatment the two movements received from law enforcement, as well as the fact that the Tea Party had its own TV network that gave daily attention to its gatherings, no matter how small, and ignored Occupy events that were much larger. Most critically, they rarely mentioned the vast funding the Tea Party “grassroots insurgency” received from the Koch brothers and Big Tobacco. In 2019, during the George Floyd demonstrations, Gregory Shupak wrote:

…the qualitative differences between antifa and the uber-right could hardly be more stark. The latter preclude debate by dehumanizing the majority of people in America (and on earth) who aren’t white, male, straight and cisgender, and by enacting threatening violence against women and minorities…Yet when the Proud Boys, Patriot Prayer, the Three Percenters and American Guard rallied in Portland, Oregon, last month—at least in part, it would seem, in an effort to encourage the government to curb left-wing dissent by classifying antifa as an “organization of terror“—mainstream media repeatedly suggested that these outfits are analogous to antifa. 

This type of FE has a long pedigree going back to the 1930s, when centrist media equated the threats of fascism and communism in America in order to marginalize leftists in trade unions. More recently, the FBI (under James Comey and Robert Mueller) also concocted a large number of fake terror plots.

A subset of false equivalency is the deliberate mobilization by local or national authorities of agents provocateurs who, in countless examples, have converted peaceful, mass demonstrations into violent riots that justify even more violent police intervention.

And currently it centers on the issue of “free speech.” Trumpus doesn’t engage much in FEs, because the media – and now academia as well – do it for him, and because (a year out of office and increasingly close to being indicted) he continues to play the spokesperson for a deliberately indefinable, populist extreme that draws its energy by pretending to attack the establishment. The fact that his actual policies, like those of all his predecessors – and Joe Biden – consistently buttressed that same establishment doesn’t matter. We are talking about rhetoric, not action.

Trumpus did utilize them after provoking and normalizing the violence In Charlottesville’s “Unite the Right” march  that left one anti-Nazi protester dead and 19 others wounded, and then equating anti-racist demonstrators with right-wing provocateurs and alt-right criminals. His notorious claim that there was both evil and “good people” on both sides was certainly an invitation to further abuses. Here’s the FE logic:

People engage in multiple, large-scale, non-violent protests.

A tiny minority of black-clad “anarchists” break store windows for the cameras.

The police respond, attacking everyone.

National media show video of the event, highlighting the violence.

Viewers get the message that all the protestors are violent.

But to spread such nonsense, Trumpus needed help from the existence of something called the “alt-left,” a term that progressives and leftists have never used to describe themselves. FOX created it, but the rest of the media ran with it, writes Adam Johnson:

…while coined by right-wing personalities such as Sean Hannity, the “alt-left” term quickly morphed into a catch-all smear employed by Clinton partisans and those charged with defending the more corporate, pro-war wing of the Democrats. It was a go-to smear online for The Nation’s Joan Walsh, Daily Beast’s Michael Weiss, Daily Kos and Vox Media founder Markos Moulitsas, Observer and Time writer Nick Cohen, Media Matters’ Eric Boehlert, self-appointed Clinton spinmeister Tom Watson, MSNBC’s Joy Ann Reid and Center for American Progress head Neera Tanden, among others. The term was similarly employed by historian Gil Troy in Time (12/6/16), Vanity Fair‘s James Wolcott (3/3/17) and Ray Suarez on NPR’s On the Media (6/12/17)…All these pundits and writers presumably thought equating leftists with Nazis (the logical implication of the “alt” prefix) was an easy way to score points and position themselves on the Reasonable Liberal Left. What they did instead was provide fodder for anyone on the right, looking to trivialize the threat of an emerging neo-Nazism, to “both sides” the problem out of existence.

Who would deny Americans the right to speak out? Certainly not the NYT. However, a study shows that its coverage of free speech on university campuses focuses on the plight of conservative students by a margin of 7-to-1.

Read Part Five here.

We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time Magazine…whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost 40 years.  –  David Rockefeller

In the US, as Dorothy Parker once said about Katharine Hepburn’s emotional range as an actress, any policy discussion ranges from A to B. – Chris Hedges

Gatekeepers, whether academics or media puppets, delight in the power to subtly determine boundaries, to let everyone know exactly who is “beyond the pale.” The word “pale” refers to the pointed wooden poles that once were used in fortifications. Think “Fort Apache.” Anyone who threatened the innocent community within the pale risked being impaled on the sharp stakes of irrefutable “argument,” or worse, ridicule.

Gatekeepers know what is expected of them, and they know each other very well. Here’s one of them (New York Times book reviewer Jacob Heilbrunn) praising another one, Jonathan Kay in 2011:

“Among the Truthers” is a remarkable book…Some of Kay’s most illuminating passages center not on what conspiracy theorists believe — even to dignify it with the word “theory” is probably to grant them more legitimacy than they deserve — but on why they are attracted to such tedious rubbish in the first place. He divides them into different camps, including the “cranks” and the “firebrands.” Cranks are often reacting to male midlife crises — combating conspiracies, Kay says, offers a new sense of mission. Cranks, he adds, are frequently math teachers, computer scientists or investigative journalists…His verdict could hardly be more categorical: “It is the mark of an intellectually pathologized society that intellectuals and politicians will reject their opponents’ realities.”

Notice how a NYT book reviewer (one of the very top levels of gatekeepers) subtly allowed his subject to do two things. First, to psychologize people, to reduce them to pitiful jokes, easily definable types acting out their midlife crises. And second, to include “investigative journalists” among the “cranks” – years before Trump would describe the Times itself as “failing” because it was so fake.

And Kay’s last statement, of course, could not be a more precise description of the gatekeeping process itself. To accuse others of doing what one himself is in fact doing is a perfect example of the psychological process of projection. To do my own psychologizing, one might well wonder about the hidden motives of someone (and his editors) who would so blatantly indict himself. But the best of the gatekeepers – imagine the vetting process one must go through to reach the level of NYT book reviewer! – are not that dumb. They do this, I’m sure, quite deliberately. Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels allegedly said, “If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.”

The state, in its ongoing effort to shore up broken timbers in the pale of American innocence, has long worked directly with the media. By now, we all know – or should know – about government lies and media collusion around the invasion of Iraq, to take just one example. BTW, liberals might find this 2003 video of their hero Robert Mueller (then FBI Director) testifying about Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” disturbing in the context of gatekeeping.

Long before Iraq, in “Operation Mockingbird,” the CIA infiltrated major news organizations, planted stories, thwarted criticism of the Warren Commission Report and labeled its critics (in 1967) as the original “conspiracy theorists.” Of the hundreds of journalists who have colluded with the CIA, wrote Carl Bernstein in 1977, “By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc.” We would be fools to assume that they ended that year.

Ultimately, we follow the money (The old Latin phrase was Cui bono? Who profits?), and here is where the idea and myth of equivalency break down utterly. We range far beyond notions of “good intentions” and “fair representation” when we hear arguments about the equivalency of access to the airwaves. Even primary gatekeepers such as the NYT and The New Yorker have admitted that long before the Citizen’s United Supreme Court decision, the Tea Party was created (in the tens of millions of dollars) by the Koch brothers and the tobacco industry. The “populist uprising” that spontaneously developed in 2009 and propelled Trumpus into the White House was nothing without these massive subsidies.

At the Koch brothers’ level of influence, one can simply buy or create entire gatekeeping institutions, such as a libertarian “think tank” that labeled North Dakota as the “most free” state in the union even as it was criminalizing abortion. Rupert Murdoch owns The Wall Street Journal and dozens of other media outlets, while CIA contractor Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post.  NBC, formerly owned by nuclear contractor General Electric, is now owned by Comcast; Disney owns ABC, and CBS was owned by Westinghouse, another nuke builder.

Back to false equivalencies: the only way to argue that “left” and “right” have equal access to media is to set the bar so low as to marginalize any voices to the left of the Democratic National Committee. There is not and never was any equivalency. Still, there is little point in blaming the rich for wanting to maintain control. We mythologists should be far more interested in why so many educated Americans support people and parties that have never served their interests, even when those interests are defined broadly as “values.”

The good news is that, even with so many of us still willing to consume the dominant mythology of innocence, so many others have always opted out. This forces people like Sheldon Adelson, Betsy DeVoss, Murdoch and the Kochs to expend their fortunes trying to keep enough of us thinking within the pale – or to abandon political engagement entirely, which serves the same purposes.

Ironically and unknowingly, these billionaire “libertarians” offer tribute to the opponents that they would destroy. To have their press puppets imply that movements that must organize bake sales to raise the money to educate the public about global warming are “equivalent” to their own slick media barrages and fabricated “mass demonstrations” is, in truth, to admit the power of authentic ideas. It is to admit the power of the people whose respect they can only buy but never earn. It is to admit that the myth of American Innocence, though very old, is also very unstable.

False equivalencies played a major role in the 2016 election. What did the media want – besides the obvious goal marginalizing Bernie Sanders – in an election that for months appeared to be one in which Hillary Clinton was a shoo-in? The media wanted business, and a close election would be good for business. We recall CBS chairman Les Moonves’ appraisal of the Trumpus phenomenon: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”

So from that perspective, it made perfect sense to emphasize equivalences, rather than differences, between Clinton and Trumpus. Large numbers of Americans, of course, didn’t need to be reminded that the Democratic Party powers had done their own job of marginalizing Sanders, and that Clinton was highly unpopular among progressives, many of whom refused to hold their noses and vote for the lesser of two evils.

What actually turned the tide in the last week of October, 2016? Russians? Voter suppression and disenfranchisement? Hacking of voting machines? James Comey’s last-minute revelations about investigating Clinton? The argument goes on. But clearly, the media got the close election that it wanted, and presenting FEs was one of its methods. The great irony is that the media that Trumpus would come to attack as “fake” had actually created him, built up his image, diminished Clinton, propelled him into office and proceeded to nourish that image through many more months of FEs.

Regardless of what we think of Hillary Clinton, the tapes of Trump bragging of abusive behavior and allegations of sexual assault and the Clinton emails were both legitimate stories, but not equivalent, as the media barrage claimed. Reasonable? The NYT even implied that Clinton supporters were equally responsible for violence at Trump rallies.

When Lester Holt, moderator of the presidential debates, spoke of “healing the divide” between the races, he was implying another simple equivalency. After the election, the Times’ primary gatekeeper David Brooks, the voice of the reasonable center, attacked “political correctness,” casually equating racists and those who fight them:

But it’s not only racists who reduce people to a single identity. These days it’s the anti-racists, too…Bias incidents on both sides have been reported. A student walking near a campus was threatened with being lit on fire because she wore a hijab. Other students were accused of being racist for supporting Mr.Trump…

Really? Was defining racists as racist equivalent to threatening and often perpetrating violence against vulnerable populations? Eric Alterman writes:

The only explanation I can muster for this embarrassment is The Times’ unyielding commitment to false-equivalency narratives…The thinking seems to boil down to this: “We’re running an article about Trump supporters’ violence against immigrants, people of color, Muslims and Jews, so shouldn’t we also say something mean about liberals too? We wouldn’t want anyone to accuse us of liberal bias.” This has long been the modus operandi at virtually every establishment media institution, and its cost has been normalizing Trump and his assaults on our free press and democratic norms.

The perspective of the reasonable center was that Trump and Sanders were simply two sides of the same coin:

NPR: “5 Ways Bernie Sanders And Donald Trump Are More Alike Than You Think”

The Atlantic: “What Trump and Sanders Have in Common”

Huffington Post: “How Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump’s Campaigns Are Similar”

The Guardian: “Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump Look Like Saviors to Voters Who Feel Left Out of the American Dream”

WAPO: “This Is How Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump Are the Same Person” (!)

And this whopper, also from the WAPO: “The Obvious Trump Running Mate? Bernie Sanders, of Course.”

Three years later, the gatekeepers again demonized Sanders with similar FEs. Julie Hollar of Fairness and Accuracy in Media wrote: 

The Post‘s executive editor, Martin Baron, immediately retorted that Sanders was spouting a “conspiracy theory,” insisting that “Jeff Bezos allows our newsroom to operate with full independence…” NPR‘s All Things Considered accused Sanders of “echoing the president’s language,” and CNN likewise accused him of using Trump’s “playbook”…(However) We could start with the 16 negative stories the Post ran in 16 hours and follow that up with the four different Sanders-bashing pieces the paper put out in seven…we might observe the time the Post “factchecked” Sanders’ claim that the world’s six wealthiest people are worth as much as half the global population. It just so happens that one of those six multi-billionaires is Bezos, which would make an ethical journalist extra careful not to show favoritism…

Not when you know who butters your bread (delivered by Amazon from Whole Foods).

Read Part Four here.

We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the U.S. public believes is false – William J. Casey, CIA Director under Ronald Reagan

If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged. – Noam Chomsky

In the old days, middle-class people heard the stories that tell us who we are by reading the reasonable giants of the press: the NYT, the WAPO, the New Yorker, the NYRB, etc, and from the major news broadcasters, or from the smooth, reassuring voices of public television and National Public Radio. Now, social media are rapidly taking their places. But they are all functioning as gatekeepers to the commonly agreed upon sense of acceptable discourse. Here are two of my articles discussing the media gatekeepers.

One of the main ways in which they banish legitimate criticism of those in power to the realm of the truly illegitimate is the use of the term “conspiracy theory”. The intent is insidious, even if often sincere. The only position that reasonable people could hold, they tell us, is the only one that remains, C – the consensual center that ranges from “not as crazy as A” to “not as crazy as B.” When they hear it repeated often enough, people hold to that center and reaffirm their sense of American Innocence. Especially in The New Yorker. 

Anyone can be a gatekeeper. All it takes is a public role, some media credibility and a willingness to marginalize an opinion to the left of your own by equating its “unreasonableness” with that of something truly loony to the right of you.

(Big) business depends on the stability of culture, with enough of the citizenry sharing its basic assumptions, even when more and more of us, from both right and left, are questioning those assumptions. For several years, as Yeats wrote, things have been falling apart and the center cannot hold.  The fact that so many journalists and commentators have taken on these roles is one of the major reasons why so many of us distrust the media. Charles Eisenstein writes:

Our institutions of knowledge production have betrayed public trust repeatedly, as have our political institutions…Now, many people won’t believe them even when they tell the truth…The loss of trust in science, journalism, and government reflects their long corruption: their arrogance and elitism, their alliance with corporate interests, and their institutionalized suppression of dissent…a profound disconnect between the public postures of our leaders and their true motivations and plans. It bespeaks a political culture that is opaque to the ordinary citizen, a world of secrecy, image, PR, spin, optics, talking points, perception management, narrative management, and information warfare. No wonder people suspect that there is another reality operating behind the curtains.

Trumpus and the extreme right wing, for their own reasons, and for all their profound, moral flaws, have understood that White rage is addictive, whether from a Christian or a New Age perspective. And they understand that people on the edges, regardless of how they got there, have already learned to distrust the center and tend to make alliances with other people on other edges.

In the past four years, for example, we have seen large numbers of New Age adherents forming bizarre coalitions with right-wingers over their shared vaccine skepticism. You can read my article about QAnon and New Age thinking here.

Meanwhile, academia continues to train prospective gatekeepers how to marginalize everyone outside the pale. Here Chomsky discusses what actually makes mainstream media “mainstream.”

There are all sorts of filtering devices to get rid of people who are a pain in the neck and think independently…the educational system is very highly geared to rewarding conformity and obedience…which ends up with people who really honestly (they aren’t lying) internalize the framework of belief and attitudes of the surrounding power system in the society. The elite institutions like, say, Harvard and Princeton and the small upscale colleges, for example, are very much geared to socialization. If you go through a place like Harvard, most of what goes on there is teaching manners; how to behave like a member of the upper classes, how to think the right thoughts, and so on…you learn that there are certain things it’s not proper to say and there are certain thoughts that are not proper to have. That is the socialization role of elite institutions and if you don’t adapt to that, you’re usually out.

When you critique the media… they get very angry. They say, quite correctly, “nobody ever tells me what to write. I write anything I like. All this business about pressures and constraints is nonsense because I’m never under any pressure.” Which is completely true, but the point is that they wouldn’t be there unless they had already demonstrated that nobody has to tell them what to write because they are going say the right thing…

Here is one of the attractions of false equivalencies: they require far less skill (or ethics) than it would take to formulate real arguments against those who question our mythic assumptions. Those who do this depend upon laziness and lack of critical thinking – and I’m not talking about the “under-educated” (who, as I mentioned in Part One, have always been more anti-war than middle-class people) but those who consider themselves well-informed. And they depend on a “wink, wink” relation to audiences who are made anxious by those criticisms.

For decades, studies have consistently shown that – when polled on specific issues such as abortion, defense spending and progressive taxation – great majorities of Americans are considerably to the left of both major parties, despite the media propaganda. So when liberal politicians and media pundits know full well both the weakness of their arguments against real progressives as well as the sources of their financial support – it is tempting to fall back on FE’s.

Certainly, most well-known journalists sincerely believe in the truth and value of the moderate, reasonable center. As Chomsky says, they wouldn’t have risen to their current positions if they didn’t. But many are obvious charlatans. Something tells me that if Bill O’Reilly or Tucker Carlson were offered enough money from some mythical, rich, progressive TV network, they’d suddenly become raving leftists.

Raving – that’s our working modifier for those outside the pale. Consider the mythic implications here: Apollo is the god of fine arts, music, beauty, truth and dry, reasonable, cerebral discourse. By contrast, Dionysus, the archetypal “Other,” is ecstatic, physical, wet, irrational, emotional. Dionysus is the shadow of American innocence. For 400 years, the white American psyche has repressed its Dionysian nature and projected it onto the scapegoated Others of our history. Gatekeepers know this. They know that if they can tar radicals with the Dionysian label – raving – the middle class, terrified of the implications, will listen. These days, when white supremacist or Christian Nationalists often really are ravingly insane, the FEs follow.

To deliberately equate, for example, 9-11 skeptics (by calling them “truthers”) or those who question the conventional narrative of the Kennedy assassination with outright racists and paranoids who label Barack Obama as a Kenya-born, Muslim socialist or cruelly claim that survivors of school shootings are “crisis actors” is not simply to delegitimize both; it is to imply that both are equally irrational and (in mythic terms) Dionysian. “We,” by contrast, are safely, acceptably Apollonian. Here’s the logic:

We laugh at the right-wing paranoids.

We repeatedly hear of left-wing criticisms in the same sentences as the paranoids.

We begin to laugh at the left-wing criticisms.

We feel better about ourselves. We know who we are.

BTW, when I first wrote this (August, 2018), an Infowars host was suggesting that the hurricane bearing down upon Hawaii had been split in two by an energy beam shot from Antarctica, possibly by John Kerry.  So what are we expected to think – what do the gatekeepers want us to think – when they mention professional (and extremely well-funded) lunacy like this in the same sentence as parents who point out that 97% of the population of western Europe drinks non-fluoridated water, and perhaps Americans might want to think about the issue?

As the myth of American Innocence continues to lose potency, we will see more and more of these attacks upon actual alternative perspectives. Hopefully, we’ll begin to understand the use of FEs.

This is the process of identity-formation in what Joseph Campbell called our “demythologized world”. We are taught to know who we are as Americans because we “know” that we are not the Other. I prefer to imagine that in other times and places people knew who they were because they had endured the process of initiation. They had made the difficult, even terrifying transition from innocence to experience. And because of this, they were nobles. They knew who they were, not who they were not. This is why the mythology of kingship retains its power in the collective unconscious, and why modern culture has reduced it to celebrity worship, as I write here.

The word “noble” comes from the same root as gnosis, or knowledge. A noble understands that, as the Hindu sage Ramana Maharshi said, there are no others.

Read Part Three here soon.

Bias in favor of the orthodox is frequently mistaken for ‘objectivity’. Departures from this ideological orthodoxy are themselves dismissed as ideological. – Michael Parenti

There’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos – Jim Hightower

In January 2013, Chuck Todd, chief White House correspondent for NBC, addressed a conference of professional vote-counters, sales reps for voting machine companies and several state officials. Todd ridiculed critics of electronic election machines, saying that they must be paranoid to think that anyone would deliberately alter election results. Earlier that week he had tweeted: “The voting machine conspiracies belong in the same category as the Trump birther garbage.” It was a time of innocence, you might say, long before 2018, when almost all the corporate media, including Todd himself, would regularly accuse Trumpus of colluding with “the Russians” to “hack” election machines in 2016.

That year, readers of daily newspapers saw several “Doonesbury” comic strips in which a consultant named Austin who works for “MyFacts” furnishes spurious “facts” on demand. In this panel he makes fun of right-wing conspiracies.

A later panel attacked “conspirators” on the left:

Austin: This is MyFacts, Austin speaking.

Caller:  My phone is tapped. So I can’t tell you my name. But I’m looking for fresh evidence that 9/11 was a government conspiracy.

Austin: I’m sorry sir, but I’m showing our truther line has been discontinued. Can I interest you in another elaborate hoax?

Caller: Who paid you off?  It was Cheney, wasn’t it?  Just nod.

Austin: How about Bin Laden. We carry irrefutable proof he’s still alive.

Doonesbury excels in making fun of “everybody”, especially the most earnest among us. In 2009 one of his panels featured his liberal talk-show host Mark Slackmeyer interviewing a college professor:

Professor: It’s quite remarkable, Mark…Americans believe in many things that can’t be verified. For instance, almost half of us believe in ghosts and 40% in alien abductions. And that availability to alternative reality is reflected in conspiracy theory. From truthism, which holds that Bush was behind 9/11, to Birthism. And, of course, we still have many legacy fringe groups like JFK grassy knollers, the staged moon landingists, etc.

Slackmeyer: Professor, is there any counter to these powerful theorists?

Professor: Not really, Mark. Only the reasonists.

Slackmeyer: Reasonists?

Professor: They believe in an evidence-based world, something called rationalism. But it’s a tiny group, not so influential.

We’ll encounter the term “fringe group” often in this essay.

What’s going on here? By including very widely held left-wing political opinions in the same category as these right-wing ideas, Doonesbury was subtly instructing readers that they all were conspiracy theories. He was doing exactly the same thing (granted, with more humor) from a liberal perspective that Todd was doing as a corporate spokesperson disguised as a TV “commentator.”

This is the narrative of false equivalency, which instructs Americans that any notions outside mainstream interpretations of reality – no matter how popular – are equally worthless. Here’s the logic:

We define A as silly.

Silly is unacceptable.

We associate B with A.

Therefore, B is silly and unacceptable.

This kind of FE (I’ll be using the abbreviation) is one kind of marginalization tactic often told by those privileged people who were, as the saying goes, “born on third base, and think they had hit a triple.”

FEs tell us more about the subject (who is making the FE) than about the object (whom they are making it about) – and about his unquestioning readers. FEs reinforce our sense of identity. We know who we are because are not like one crazy extreme, and not like the other either. We can laugh at both of them.

When FEs are told honestly and innocently (as opposed to, say, by a CNN News hack), they often imply a certain cognitive dissonance:

A – Trumpus is bad.

B – We progressives dislike Trumpus.

C – Therefore, we are good, and we feel good about ourselves.

D – John McCain was a warmonger who voted with Trumpus 83% of the time.

E – McCain and Trumpus disliked each other.

F – Since Trumpus is bad, McCain was good.

G –To convince ourselves of F, we must ignore D, through cognitive dissonance.

H – Since McCain was good, he was like us, and we feel better.

This is one way in which we perpetuate the myth of American Innocence.

There are countless websites and books devoted to narratives that marginalize those who question the dominant paradigms of the culture. They typically do this by offering lists of “loony”, “fringe” theories from the perspective of the “rational center.” In almost every case, such gatekeepers lump all the questioners together. Then with patronizing, pseudo-psychology, they explore the unconscious motivations of “conspiracy theorists”, be they fascists or anarchists, Christians or Pagans, oligarchs or street people. And these gatekeepers like each other.

For example, Radical Middle – The Politics We need Now, by Mark Satin, was praised by a former adviser to Ronald Reagan. It received another blurb from Ted Halstead, himself the author of The Radical Center: The Future of American Politics, who called it “an antidote to the Al Frankens and Ann Coulters who dominate contemporary political discourse.” Do you see the FE? That discourse stretched between a racist hatemonger and a future U.S. Senator.

Such styles are well within one of two very old American traditions of gatekeeping, the purpose of which is to shore up the cracks in the myth of American innocence. One is to lie outright about American history. Here’s the logic:

A is a story that makes us feel good about ourselves.

There is no other story, no B.

Since A is the only story, we are justified in feeling good about ourselves.

Noam Chomsky, however, writes:

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.

Some writers have called that spectrum of acceptable opinion and discourse the “Overton window”. The gatekeepers of culture – traditionally, the priesthood – regularly determine just how wide it will be, and how far outside it other opinions are allowed to flourish. These days, it’s clear that the Overton Window is moving subtly but constantly to the right. 

In America, however, which has always lacked an official church, it begins in academia, where all prospective gatekeepers receive their training. The process of initiation into higher education (and the careers it opens one to) nearly guarantees that those admitted within the pale are already thinking within very narrow boundaries. This is clearly true for journalists. Chomsky has called this “a system of imposed ignorance” in which the most highly educated people are the most highly indoctrinated:

A good education instills in you the intuitive comprehension – it becomes unconscious and reflexive – that you just don’t think certain things…that are threatening to power interests.

Over the years, polls clearly indicate the results: the higher one’s education, the more one is likely to unquestioningly support America’s wars – and the reverse is also true. Despite the public stereotypes of rebellious students during the Viet Nam years, resistance to the draft varied inversely with income and educational levels. The poorer and less educated you were, the more likely you were to resist. 

The other tradition is to ridicule any political positions further out on the spectrum (left or right) often enough so as to deprive them of legitimacy and, by contrast, manufacture the legitimacy of the “center.” Here’s the logic:

A is too far out in one direction. It may be admirable, but it’s unrealistic or impractical.

B is too far in the other direction – even if it is mendacious and hateful.

C lies in between them.

A and B should negotiate until they compromise at C.

Therefore, C is legitimate, practical, realistic, moral and workable.

This, most politically savvy people tell us, is how things get accomplished in the real world. Especially since the upheavals of the 1960s, countless books and news aggregators have extolled the innate wisdom of the great democratic middle and the need for idealists to find common ground with their adversaries. It’s often very good advice.

But I’m not talking about people who see some good in each side of a debate, who play by the same rules and have comparable, idealistic visions of the common good. I’m talking about those spokespersons for that same corporate-consumerist, business-as-usual, consensual reality of American empire that the 1960s called into question. I’m talking about people whose jobs depend on their knowing very well that allowing actual alternative thinking (socialist; anarchist; anti-imperialist; environmentalist; anti-consumerist; anti-policing; advocates for racial, healthcare, prison, gender, immigration reform and drug justice, etc.) into the public discourse and airwaves would threaten both that consensus and their own jobs.

I’m talking about people who want us to forget about radical change because – they tell us – some of its adherents and some of their proposals are as laughably, preposterously unacceptable as are those on the other extreme.

Read Part Two here.