as is becoming more and more evident — Alex Jones and Infowars, Gen. Michael Flynn and his son, and of course the twitterer-in-chief himself.
The incident this past Sunday at Comet Ping Pong in DC has exposed even more how widespread the problem is.
I am strongly suggesting that everyone read carefully the following story in today’s Washington Post:
Pizzagate: From rumor, to hashtag, to gunfire in D.C.
I am not going to do an extensive analysis of the story.
I do want to quote a few things that are illustrative before I make a few of my own observations.
We can start with something key in the election, as we all know, James Comey’s October 28 letter about possibly reopening the investigation of Clinton emails because of what was found in a separate investigation into Anthony Wiener”
Two days later, someone tweeting under the handle @DavidGoldbergNY cited rumors that the new emails “point to a pedophilia ring and @HillaryClinton is at the center.” The rumor was retweeted more than 6,000 times.
We know how quickly things can spread online, and anyone paying attention has long been aware of how warped some people’s interpretation of symbols and other things has been — perhaps you may remember the tales about the symbol used by Proctor and Gamble being a sign of the devil, as you can read here. The problem is worse today with the internet — think of Jade Helm, for example.
So, immediately after what I have quoted above we read
The notion quickly moved to other social-media platforms, including 4chan and Reddit, mostly through anonymous or pseudonymous posts. On the far-right site Infowars, talk-show host Alex Jones repeatedly suggested that Clinton was involved in a child sex ring and that her campaign chairman, John Podesta, indulged in satanic rituals.
It is worth noting that one meme that is fairly common in some of these things is the notion of satanism and satanic rituals. I should point out this has a LONG history, including charges of witchcraft levied against women over a long period of time, whether in medieval times, in Salem in our country’s early days, or in contemporary Africa. It underlies the blood libel levied against Jews in Europe. And of course there are hints of it — or even direct charges — in the Islamophobic rants of today.
Returning to the article, allow me to offer some of the words offered by people quoted in the piece:
From Alex Jones:
“When I think about all the children Hillary Clinton has personally murdered and chopped up and raped, I have zero fear standing up against her,” Jones said in a YouTube video posted on Nov. 4. “Yeah, you heard me right. Hillary Clinton has personally murdered children. I just can’t hold back the truth anymore.”
According to YouTube, that video has been viewed more than 427,000 times.
I remind people how narrow Clinton’s loss was.
One of the sites responsible for spreading the rumors about Comet Ping Pong was 4chan. Here is the proprietor of that noxious site:
The owner of 4chan, Hiroyuki Nishimura, said in an email to The Post that “Pizzagate reminds me that a country indicated [there were] stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and many people and countries were deceived. It is same old story.”
Nishimura, a Japanese Internet entrepreneur, said the rumors about Comet could be false: “Some people, who believe they do something good, may be deceived by false information.” But, he said, their motive was good; they “did it for saving children.”
Notice both the false equivalence as a justification and the rationale to excuse this particular noxious rumor.
Or how about Brittany Pettibone, a right wing online activist from California who helped spread the rumor:
“I was one of the first,” Pettibone said in a brief conversation Tuesday. She said she would not take part in an interview: “I’m uninclined to speak to mainstream media because during the election cycle, they made the right look like nut jobs because we suspected Hillary had a health issue, and it turned out she did.”
Note the paranoia contained in that quote.
Mr. Welch, the gentleman who showed up with the weapons on Sunday, is clearly a disturbed young man. The article gives a great deal of his background that clearly demonstrates it. But please note the reaction to his arrest:
Within hours of Welch’s arrest, online conspiracy theorists had already decided that he was not one of them. Some suggested he was a “false flag,” a government plant — an enemy of their cause — who had been used in an elaborate plot to conceal the truth.
For years, people have made similar claims about everything from the 9/11 attacks (a government conspiracy to justify war, they say) to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting (a government conspiracy to justify gun control, they say).
Now, in Welch’s case, the conspiracy theorists insisted that the real news about his dangerous assault was, in fact, fake news.
By now you have a real sense of the problem, so rather than quoting more I will encourage you read the entire article, which is thorough, and which should be troubling.
We have a putative President (technically not President-elect before December 19 at the earliest) who has no real regard for truth, and whose minions say both that there are no real facts and that and issue of truthfulness of his assertions don’t matter because they were made in order to win — if the latter sounds like the notion of the end justifies the mean, it is, and the problem then is what is that end intended to be, because certainly the gentleman in question did not provide a real direction for the country other than as his subsequent actions have made clear as a means of self aggrandizement and enrichment for himself and his offspring.
But we also now have a culture where there is no common standard of what is factual, or a common source of information widely shared, which makes meaningful dialog to address the real needs of the people increasingly difficult: how does one address the issues of energy and environment with those who argue that climate change is a hoax perpetuated by the Chinese or bring snowballs onto the floor of the US Senate to “prove” there is no warming as part of global climate change? How do we negotiate issues of social safety nets with people whose perspective is that they will ignore any evidence of the positive difference such programs make in favor of a perspective derived from either a narrow theological perspective or a distorted set of economic ideas used to justify selfishness and self-justification? How lacking both common standards of ascertaining truth and fact and common organs of communicating information do we overcome this?
This site argues that we must be fact-based, which is why certain conspiracy theories have always been grounds for banishment. But such is not the approach of many in this country, and I note that those for whom it is not are not merely those on the right of the political spectrum.
Before we can address the issue, we must recognize the problem.
Only then are we going to be able to address it.
And if we cannot?
Then this constitutional republic/democracy and this society will not survive.