On Epistemic Black Holes. How Self-Sealing Belief Systems Develop and Evolve

Posted on May 8, 2023 by Luke Ford

Here are excerpts from a preprint of a 2023 philosophy paper:

* Here’s a sample of some extremely implausible and unfounded beliefs that are endorsed by many apparently sane and rational people even in the age of modern science: the Moon landing never happened but was staged in a Hollywood studio; extraterrestrial visitors have abducted people in their sleep and conducted sexual experiments on them; the 9/11 attacks were an inside job carried out by the Bush administration; all living creatures were created in their present form a couple of thousands years ago; the world is secretly run by a small clique of Satan-worshipping pedophiles (or by a super-race of extraterrestrial lizard beings); the vaccines against COVID-19 contain nano-tech microchips invented by Bill Gates in a plan for mind control and world domination; and the Earth is a flat disc surrounded by a wall of ice known as ‘Antarctica’.

* The analogy between belief systems and black holes was originally introduced by Stephen Law, who talked about “a bubble of belief that, while seductively easy to enter, can then be almost impossible to think your way out of again.”

* Epistemic black holes can also be regarded as special cases of ‘unfalsifiable’ theories…

* “conspiracy theories” refer to a class of unfounded and implausible theories that are held in the absence of good evidence. Examples include the belief that the moon landing was staged in a Hollywood studio, that 9/11 was an inside job perpetrated by the Bush administration, or that the Sandy Hook school shooting was staged with paid actors as part of a gun control campaign. It also includes broader conspiratorial worldviews that explain all or most historical events as resulting from the intentions of a small cadre of invisible actors, such as the Elders of Zion, the Rothschilds, or the Illuminati…

* If you postulate the existence of intelligent agents working behind the scenes to cover up the evidence for their existence, then you have some reason to expect an absence of evidence for your theory, and even the discovery of (false) counterevidence.

* according to Hannah Arendt, the story of a global Jewish conspiracy benefited from the built-in and self-sealing notion that, the “more consistently a discussion of the Jewish question was avoided by all parties and organs of public opinion,” the more believers became convinced that “Jews were the true representatives of the powers that be” …

* If the Protocols had been an authentic document and if the Elders of Zion as portrayed there really existed, we would expect them to dissimulate the evidence for their secret plans. And if the Jews really controlled all the other parties behind the scenes, we would expect those parties to remain suspiciously silent on (or dismissive of) the “Jewish question.” In the 1905 introduction to the Protocols, the reader is warned not to be fooled by the absence of witnesses to corroborate the reality of the organization and their evil plans. In fact, such an absence of evidence is exactly what we should expect: “were it possible to prove this world-wide conspiracy by means of letters or by declarations of witnesses, […] the “mysteries of iniquity,” would by this very fact, be violated. To prove itself, it has to remain unmolested till the day of its incarnation in the “son of perdition” […].”

* Even today, a full century after having been debunked, the Protocols are still being regularly reprinted, disseminated and discussed as an authentic document, now predominantly in the Islamic world, but also elsewhere.
A similar self-sealing logic can be observed with many other popular conspiracy theories. When the 9/11 Commission, set up by the U.S. Congress, published its final 585-page report in 2004, reviewing half a million documents and detailing the responsibility of Al Qaeda and the failures of U.S. intelligence agencies in excruciating detail, conspiracy theorists were hardly impressed. After all, if the U.S. government had itself staged the attack as a false flag operation, in order to create a pretext for invading Iraq and Afghanistan, we would expect them to fabricate a sham report full of false evidence and distortions.
An initially credible conspiracy hypothesis about a specific historical event (such as the murder of John F. Kennedy) may degenerate into an epistemic black hole when it ends up attributing superhuman powers and intelligence to some unseen conspirators working behind the scenes.

* …important strands within the world religions of Islam and Christianity conceive of God as secretly working behind the scenes, even covering up the evidence for his own existence. In the Bible, for instance, God is sometimes portrayed as deliberately hiding from human beings, as in this complaint from the Book of Isaiah: “Truly, thou art a God who hidest thyself” (Isaiah 45:15). Many Christians believe that, after creating the universe, God has (mostly) retreated from the world. This conception of God, which is known as deus absconditus or the problem of divine hiddenness (Schellenberg, 2006), is a recurring theme in the Christian tradition (Philipse, 2012, pp. 302-309). God seems to be not just invisible to the human senses—which is understandable given that he is immaterial and bodiless—but remains elusive even to those who actively seek him. Events that are apparently at odds with the notion of a hidden divine plan are often explained away by arguing that “God moves in mysterious ways”…

* Theologians and ordinary believers have developed different justifications for divine hiddenness, the most dominant of which is that it is a test of faith (Murray, 1993; Schellenberg, 2006). If God revealed himself for all the world to see, it would be too easy to believe in his existence. By keeping out of sight and leaving the evidence for his existence inconclusive or ambiguous, God can separate the unbelievers and doubters from those with true faith. Similar ideas can be found in the Quran, where God explains at some point that, though he generally supports the community of righteous believers in their fight against the infidels, he will not always grant them victory on the battlefield. Rather, he will allow for some occasional defeats and setbacks, in order to test the strength of their faith. A related response to the problem of divine hiddenness is that God wants to give us morally significant free will, and that revealing himself in any manifest way would take away that freedom (Swinburne, 2004). Whatever the rationale for divine hiddenness, what it comes down to is a form of divine deception (Nieminen, Boudry, Ryökäs, & Mustonen, 2017): God could clearly reveal himself to us, or at least leave evidence for his existence, but he decided to stay out of sight and even cover up his tracks.
In light of these features, a number of authors have recently pointed out the epistemological similarities between theism and conspiracy theories (Edis, 2019; Keeley, 2007). As these authors admit, however, monotheism cannot strictly speaking be regarded as a conspiracy theory because, by definition, God is a unified and single agent who has no-one to conspire with. Indeed, as Keeley (2007) has argued, God has “no need to conspire with anybody to bring about Providence according to His wishes” (Keeley, 2007, p. 140), because he is by definition all-powerful and all-knowing. Only fallible humans need to collaborate with others to carry out elaborate and complex forms of deception.

* Once you adopt the hypothesis that an invisible (omnipotent) supernatural being is covering up the evidence for his own existence, it might become very hard to reason your way out of such a belief system.

* Freudian psychoanalysis has the same self-sealing quality as popular conspiracy theories about history or the witchcraft belief system in early modern Europe, in which absence of evidence or apparent counterevidence could always be interpreted in the theory’s own terms. When Freud was unable to find traces of a pathological complex or unconscious desire to account for a patient’s behavior, he was undeterred and treated this as a token of unconscious resistance. Since the unconscious was motivated to hide and disguise its dark secrets, it was not surprising to find an apparent lack of evidence. According to the same logic of deception, apparent refutations of the theory could be explained away with equal ease. In his clinical practice, Freud worked on the assumption that his patients harbored a secret and unconscious desire to disprove his own explanations, so as to avoid having to confront their own repressed desires. If a patient dismissed his psychoanalytic interpretations of their symptoms or dreams, he interpreted this as evidence of “resistance” or “denial”, as predicted by the theory (Cioffi, 1998). If the patient ceded to Freud and accepted his latest explanation, of course this also counted in favor of the theory, namely as an instance of resistance overcome through therapeutic pressure.

* Because of their self-sealing character, epistemic black holes are extremely resilient against external challenges in the form of counterevidence or skeptical questions. This strong resilience, however, comes at a steep cost: the belief systems suffers from a problem of arbitrariness, in the sense that the available evidence is always congruent with many different versions, and there is no rational way to adjudicate between them.

* the conceptual core structure of psychoanalysis provides a sort of empty shell into which any number of rival theoretical notions can be inserted. In particular, while Freud’s original theory centered around the Oedipus complex and the notion of infantile sexual desires, later theorists have developed the theory in widely divergent (and often incompatible) directions. Otto Rank’s version of psychoanalysis reduces virtually every psychological complex to the repressed birth trauma, Alfred Adler unearthed inferiority complexes everywhere, Melanie Klein introduced the notion of unconscious breast envy as a counterweight to penis envy, Carl Jung developed the theory of unconscious archetypes (anima, persona, shadow), and so forth (Macmillan, 1997).
In the absence of any evidential constraints for fixing the parameters of conspiracy explanations, the psychoanalytic movement has often been beset by irresolvable theoretical disputes and schisms. In the words of Frederick Crews (1998, p. xxx), the epistemological structure of psychoanalysis renders the development of the psychoanalytic movement “drastically centrifugal, spinning off ever more numerous, mutually excommunicating schools and cliques” (see also Gordin, 2012, p. 202).

* In the aftermath of the Second World War, however, Jews abruptly disappear from conspiracist literature (with the notable exception of Soviet Russia under Stalin). This had nothing to do with novel evidence, but with the almost universal abhorrence of Nazism. Most conspiracy theorists, even the ones who had promoted antisemitic conspiracies before the war, started to abandon or downplay the Jewish element and settled for other suitable culprits such as the CIA or FBI, a choice that reflected the ascent of the United States as the new global superpower. Other favorite targets became the United Nations and the Bilderberg group, a transnational organization of political leaders and other elites which holds annual conferences since 1954 and which, owing to its notorious privacy and secrecy, was an ideal target for conspiracy theorists. In short, this shift from Jews to other perpetrators did not reflect any novel evidence, but was driven by “changing social and political circumstances” (Byford, 2011, p. 97).

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‘The truths of the Judaic-Christian tradition’

Posted on May 7, 2023 by Luke Ford

According to Margaret Thatcher: “The truths of the Judaic-Christian tradition are infinitely precious, not only, as I believe, because they are true, but also because they provide the moral impulse which alone can lead to that peace, in the true meaning of the word, for which we all long… There is little hope for democracy if the hearts of men and women in democratic societies cannot be touched by a call to something greater than themselves.”

In a normal society, people love their families and their extended families, including their people, also known as their nation. This love has nothing to do with Judeo-Christian values.

As far as “the moral impulse which alone can lead to that peace, in the true meaning of the word, for which we all long”, the East Asians produce societies far more law abiding and peaceful than any seen in the Jewish and Christian worlds.

As long as tens of millions of people such as the Japanese are more decent than the most committed nations of monotheists, I’m not sure how one can argue that God is necessary for ethics (something I’ve believed almost all of my life).

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Repro-Shabbat

Posted on May 7, 2023 by Luke Ford

Dennis Prager writes Feb. 21, 2023:

The NCJW [National Council of Jewish Women] prepared a “Repro-Shabbat Playlist” on Spotify featuring such Jewish and holy songs as:

“Bitch” (Meredith Brooks).

“I Spent My Last $10 (On Birth Control & Beer)” (Two Nice Girls).

“Bodies” (Sex Pistols), whose lyrics deemed appropriate for Repro-Shabbat include “Ah! F— this and f— that. F— it all, and f**k the f**king brat.”

“I Luv Abortion” (Xiu Xiu): “When I look at my thighs, I see death / It is great, I love abortion!”

Wash It All Off (Foetus): “You’ve got Foetus on your breath / You’ve got Foetus on your breath / You’ve got Foetus on your breath / You’ve got Foetus on your breath.”

And the NCJW advises the song, “F— Men” (Ms. White) — perhaps to be sung while the Torah is being taken from the ark. Its refrain goes like this: “F— men / You don’t need those tears in your eyes / F— men. You can tell him that it’s too hard / And just leave him with a broken heart / And baby f— men, f— men, f— men.”

Posted in Abortion, Reform Judaism | Comments Off on Repro-Shabbat

Epistemic Sabotage

Posted on May 7, 2023 by Luke Ford

People like Dennis Prager, in the words of Decoding The Gurus, "produce ersatz wisdom: a corrupt epistemics that creates the appearance of useful knowledge, but has none of the substance. …the guru is highly motivated to undertake epistemic sabotage; to disparage authoritative and institutional sources of knowledge."

When I argue that someone like Dennis Prager engages in epistemic corruption, I claim that he manipulates knowledge for his personal, professional and monetary gain, and by so doing, he pollutes public and private discourse. 

Dennis Prager's March 7, 2023 column is a classic example of his habit of epistemic sabotage. The innumerate pundit normally disdains academic studies, but because he found one that he thought supported his point of view, he embraced it as a truth bomb against the Left without regard to what it actually said. To push his personal and ideological agenda, he treated truth like a used tampon. 

Why the Left Is Pro-Mask

The world’s most trusted evaluator of medical studies, the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, has just released as close to a conclusive report on the effectiveness of masks against respiratory viruses such as COVID-19 as we are likely to have for the foreseeable future. The report assessed data from 78 different studies, including 11 new randomized controlled trials involving 610,872 participants.

In the words of one of the authors, Dr. Tom Jefferson of Oxford University, Cochrane concluded, “There is just no evidence that they (masks) make any difference. Full stop.”

Among the reasons for that assessment was Cochrane’s conclusion that states and countries with mask mandates fared no better than states and countries without.

Moreover, Dr. Jefferson’s conclusions were not limited to cloth and surgical masks. Regarding N95 masks, Jefferson said, “Makes no difference — none of it.”

As for the early COVID-19 studies that policymakers cited to justify mandates for mask-wearing, Jefferson said: “They were convinced by nonrandomized studies, flawed observational studies.”

Compare Prager's column with the essay of sociologist Zeynep Tufekci in the New York Times March 10, 2023:

Here’s Why the Science Is Clear That Masks Work

“Many commentators have claimed that a recently updated Cochrane review shows that ‘masks don’t work,’ which is an inaccurate and misleading interpretation,” Karla Soares-Weiser, the editor in chief of the Cochrane Library, said in a statement.

“The review examined whether interventions to promote mask wearing help to slow the spread of respiratory viruses,” Soares-Weiser said, adding, “Given the limitations in the primary evidence, the review is not able to address the question of whether mask wearing itself reduces people’s risk of contracting or spreading respiratory viruses.”

She said that “this wording was open to misinterpretation, for which we apologize,” and that Cochrane would revise the summary.

Soares-Weiser also said, though, that one of the lead authors of the review even more seriously misinterpreted its finding on masks by saying in an interview that it proved “there is just no evidence that they make any difference.” In fact, Soares-Weiser said, “that statement is not an accurate representation of what the review found.”

While the review assessed 78 studies, only 10 of those focused on what happens when people wear masks versus when they don’t, and a further five looked at how effective different types of masks were at blocking transmission, usually for health care workers. The remainder involved other measures aimed at lowering transmission, like hand washing or disinfection, while a few studies also considered masks in combination with other measures. Of those 10 studies that looked at masking, the two done since the start of the Covid pandemic both found that masks helped.

The calculations the review used to reach a conclusion were dominated by prepandemic studies that were not very informative about how well masks blocked the transmission of respiratory viruses…

Soares-Weiser told me the review should be seen as a call for more data, and said she worried that misinterpretations of it could undermine preparedness for future outbreaks…

Lab studies, many of which were done during the pandemic, show that masks, particularly N95 respirators, can block viral particles. Linsey Marr, an aerosol scientist who has long studied airborne viral transmission, told me even cloth masks that fit well and use appropriate materials can help…

David Lazer, a political scientist at Northeastern University, calculated that before vaccines were available, U.S. states without mask mandates had 30 percent higher Covid death rates than those with mandates…

So the evidence is relatively straightforward: Consistently wearing a mask, preferably a high-quality, well-fitting one, provides protection against the coronavirus…

Others have come to think mandates represent illogical rules. To be sure, we did have many illogical rules: mandating masks outdoors and even at beaches, or wearing them to enter a restaurant but not at the table, or requiring children as young as 2 to mask in day care but not during nap time (presumably, the virus also took a nap). Some mask proponents and public health authorities have also used weak studies to make overblown or imprecise claims about masks’ effectiveness…

It’s no surprise that Jefferson says he has no faith in masks’ ability to stop the spread of Covid.

In that interview, he said there is no basis to say the coronavirus is spread by airborne transmission — despite the fact that major public health agencies have long said otherwise. He has long doubted well-accepted claims about the virus. In an article he co-wrote in April 2020, Jefferson questioned whether the Covid outbreak was a pandemic at all, rather than just a long respiratory illness season. At that point, New York City schools had been closed for a month and Covid had killed thousands of New Yorkers. When New York was preparing “M*A*S*H”-like mobile hospitals in Central Park, he said there was no point in mitigations to slow the spread.

In an editorial accompanying a 2020 version of the review — the review is in its sixth update since 2006 — Soares-Weiser noted a lack of “robust, high-quality evidence for any behavioral measure or policy” and said that “when protecting the public from harm is the objective, public health officials must act in a precautionary manner to take action even when evidence is uncertain (or not of the highest quality).”

Which of the two authors above is more committed to truth? Prager or Tufekci? Due to his agenda, Prager took what he wanted out of the study, and then moved on, like a man dispensing with a whore. 

Prager reminds me of the protagonist of the 1970 Paul Simon song The Boxer. "Still a man hears what he wants to hear/And disregards the rest"

Justin Peters wrote for Slate Nov. 8, 2021:

On Monday, Nov. 1, Dennis Prager began his popular radio show with a very strange boast. “I rarely say, ‘I did the following.’ It’s not my style,” the 73-year-old conservative host and YouTube culture war impresario said. “But I believe I am responsible for the CDC announcing the following: that if you have natural immunity you are less immune than if you have the vaccine.”

Prager was referring to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study, released on Friday, Oct. 29, which found, basically, that the immunity conferred by full vaccination with an mRNA COVID vaccine is more effective than the “natural immunity” gained by having had and recovered from COVID-19. Good news, right? Ha! If you welcomed the CDC’s findings, you are almost certainly not in Dennis Prager’s target demographic.

The CDC’s conclusions are broadly in line with the scientific consensus on the efficacy of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. And they directly contradict Prager’s contention, voiced over and again on his long-running, nationally syndicated show, that natural immunity to COVID-19 is superior to vaccinated immunity. To Prager, the CDC’s latest findings did not mean that he, Prager, was wrong—they meant that the liberal, corrupt health agency had ginned up a bogus study in order to cloud the debate and specifically silence his voice.

“All I did was open up to you, my audience,” Prager said, referring to his advocacy for natural immunity. “I had no idea that I would shake up the nest to the extent that I did.” Assuring his audience that he had done “a lot of homework on COVID,” and highlighting an Israeli study from August (even though it has not yet been peer reviewed and had certain limitations that ought to make any prudent person think twice before citing it as definitive), Prager weaved a fantastical counternarrative as a way of underscoring his central point: that the CDC study in question was a dirty, rotten lie. “To some of you, it is stunning to say the CDC is lying,” said Prager. “To me, it is like saying the sun shines brightly when there are no clouds.”

Huh? Why would the CDC rush out a false study—co-authored by more than 50 people—just to neutralize a random right-wing radio host? Why would Prager presume calumny and conspiracy in the agency’s motives? These fair questions naturally beget another fair question: Why are so many right-wing talk show hosts still being such dicks about COVID measures?

…“I took ivermectin for the last year and a half as a prophylactic, believing, and I put my actions where my mouth was, believing that ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine and zinc, et cetera, over the course of time, that it would prevent COVID from being seriously injurious to me,” Prager said on that Nov. 1 show, railing against those fools in the media who dared to characterize ivermectin as a mere “horse dewormer.” As per the irrationalist imperative to willfully confuse correlation with causation, the host presented his victorious bout with COVID as clear evidence both of the merits of Dr. Prager’s Curative Elixirs and of the superfluity of the various vaccines. By ostensibly proving that his ivermectin use was what prevented him from dying from COVID, Prager hoped to demonstrate that he was once again privy to the “real truth” that the liberal establishment is determined to suppress.

For decades now, the most successful conservative broadcast media sources have sought to isolate their audiences by constantly sowing distrust of any news outlet or official entity that exists outside of the hard right. The unifying theme is the notion that there are no depths to which the deep state, liberal media, and elitist professoriate will not stoop in order to advance their godless, anti-American, and culturally transgressive agendas.

So for committed Pragerheads, it is perfectly rational to believe—even as 750,000 Americans have died due to COVID-19—that the media is still suppressing the real truth about ivermectin and that the CDC is basically SPECTRE, because right-wing media has literally spent decades convincing its audience that politics is as conspiratorial and simplistic as a James Bond movie. “It’s impossible, virtually impossible, to live in a right-wing bubble,” Prager said on his program on Wednesday, in a statement that is so un-self-aware as to be almost entirely self-aware. Prager surely understands how right-wing media works, even as he also surely understands that he can never, ever publicly admit it.

This cynical strategy, enervating enough in normal times, is especially frustrating in the midst of an ongoing public health crisis in which lots and lots of people are still dying in part thanks to the endemic misinformation being spread by dummies on the radio. Actually, dummies might not be the right word here. No matter what you might think of their politics, Prager and his nationally prominent peers are not stupid. You can tell this is true because they are so adept at dancing right up to the lies-and-lunacy line while almost never crossing it. The evening opinion hosts on Fox News, for example, rarely tell outright lies; instead, they draw false equivalencies, or cherry-pick outlying details and use them to inaccurately characterize the whole, or offer misleading narratives that can be explained away as matters of opinion.

Even Prager is not explicitly anti-vaccine. He does not say that the vaccines don’t work, or that they are actively harmful to those who take them. Instead, he disparages them via a boatload of logical fallacies that he presents as plain common sense. “I have never once told any of you or anyone not to take the vaccine; it is not my province to tell you what to do. But it is my province to tell you the truth, and the truth is that natural immunity is stronger,” said Prager on Nov. 1. “Alex Berenson wrote about this. He’s the guy who was with the New York Times until he started telling the truth.”

As always with right-wing anti–virtue signaling, deflection is the point here. Prager and his peers’ goal writ large is to get their audiences so hot and bothered about federal government overreach and the scurrilous rascals in the elitist media that those audiences do not stop to think critically about what these hosts are actually selling. When Prager threw his show to commercial break, his announcer reported that The Dennis Prager Show was broadcasting “live from the Relief Factor Pain-Free Studio.” The ad gave away the game.

As historian Rick Perlstein observed in his seminal Baffler essay “The Long Con,” and as anyone can observe by watching or listening to more than 20 minutes of conservative broadcast content, right-wing media is and has long been underwritten by billions of dollars of advertising for dubious curatives. While lots of reputable news sources also have some questionable advertisers, the practice is particularly pervasive on the right…

“The strategic alliance of snake-oil vendors and conservative true believers points up evidence of another successful long march, of tactics designed to corral fleeceable multitudes all in one place,” wrote Perlstein. “One weird trick”–style remedies, in a very real sense, pay the salaries of hosts such as Prager; these hosts are incentivized to tout them just as their audiences are conditioned to trust them. The vaccines threaten the framework of burnished shit that supports and sustains these sorts of programs…

On Monday, Prager led off his show by blasting the city of Los Angeles for a new ordinance that would require patrons to show proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test in order to dine inside a restaurant, get a haircut, or engage in certain other indoor activities. Prager warned of “the communist hell that all communists create, and will in the United States if allowed,” and bemoaned “the love of power and the hypochondriacal fear, the maniacal fear that pervades the left about [COVID] and global warming.” Then, he threw the show to a commercial for Relief Factor, in which he spoke glowingly about the supplement’s “100 percent drug free ingredients, each helping your body deal with inflammation.”

…the layout of HumanEvents.com on the day it featured an article headlined “Ideas Will Drive Conservatives’ Revival.” Two inches beneath that bold pronouncement, a box headed “Health News” included the headlines “Reverse Crippling Arthritis in 2 Days,” “Clear Clogged Arteries Safely & Easily—without drugs, without surgery, and without a radical diet,” and “High Blood Pressure Cured in 3 Minutes . . . Drop Measurement 60 Points.” It would be interesting, that is, to ask Coulter about the reflex of lying that’s now sutured into the modern conservative movement’s DNA—and to get her candid assessment of why conservative leaders treat their constituents like suckers.

When Prager came back, he was at it again about natural immunity and the CDC—“who I believe are professional liars,” he clarified. By sowing doubt over the vaccines and crying foul over mandates, Prager and his peers are running through the tribal script of right-wing infotainment, otherizing every idea and institution that could plausibly be considered “liberal.” But in a very real sense, they just don’t want the liberals’ miracle drugs, because they already have plenty of their own.

In 2012, Rick Perlstein wrote:

The Long Con – Mail-order conservatism

In 2007, I signed on to the email lists of several influential magazines on the right, among them Townhall, which operates under the auspices of evangelical Stuart Epperson’s Salem Communications; Newsmax, the organ more responsible than any other for drumming up the hysteria that culminated in the impeachment of Bill Clinton; and Human Events, one of Ronald Reagan’s favorite publications. The exercise turned out to be far more revealing than I expected. Via the battery of promotional appeals that overran my email inbox, I mainlined a right-wing id that was invisible to readers who encounter conservative opinion at face value…. I learned of the “23-Cent Heart Miracle,” the one “Washington, the medical industry, and drug companies REFUSE to tell you about.” (Why would they? They’d just be leaving money on the table: “I was scheduled for open heart surgery when I read about your product,” read one of the testimonials. “I started taking it and now six months have passed and I haven’t had open-heart surgery.”) Then came news of the oilfield in the placenta…

These are bedtime stories, meant for childlike minds. Or, more to the point, they are in the business of producing childlike minds. Conjuring up the most garishly insatiable monsters precisely in order to banish them from underneath the bed, they aim to put the target to sleep.

Dishonesty is demanded by the alarmist fundraising appeal because the real world doesn’t work anything like this. The distance from observable reality is rhetorically required; indeed, that you haven’t quite seen anything resembling any of this in your everyday life is a kind of evidence all by itself. It just goes to show how diabolical the enemy has become. He is unseen; but the redeemer, the hero who tells you the tale, can see the innermost details of the most baleful conspiracies. Trust him. Send him your money. Surrender your will—and the monster shall be banished for good.

This method highlights the fundamental workings of all grassroots conservative political appeals, be they spurious claims of Barack Obama’s Islamic devotion, the supposed explosion of taxpayer-supported welfare fraud, or the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

And, in an intersection that is utterly crucial, this same theology of fear is how a certain sort of commercial appeal—a snake-oil-selling one—works as well. This is where the retail political lying practiced by Romney links up with the universe in which 23-cent miracle cures exist (absent the hero’s intervention) just out of reach, thanks to the conspiracy of some powerful cabal—a cabal that, wouldn’t you know it in these late-model hustles, perfectly resembles the ur-villain of the conservative mind: liberals.

In this respect, it’s not really useful, or possible, to specify a break point where the money game ends and the ideological one begins. They are two facets of the same coin—where the con selling 23-cent miracle cures for heart disease inches inexorably into the one selling miniscule marginal tax rates as the miracle cure for the nation itself. The proof is in the pitches—the come-ons in which the ideological and the transactional share the exact same vocabulary, moral claims, and cast of heroes and villains.

…Lying is an initiation into the conservative elite. In this respect, as in so many others, it’s like multilayer marketing: the ones at the top reap the reward—and then they preen, pleased with themselves for mastering the game. Closing the sale, after all, is mainly a question of riding out the lie: showing that you have the skill and the stones to just brazen it out, and the savvy to ratchet up the stakes higher and higher. Sneering at, or ignoring, your earnest high-minded mandarin gatekeepers—“we’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers,” as one Romney aide put it—is another part of closing the deal.

Posted in Conservatives, Corona Virus | Comments Off on Epistemic Sabotage

The Andrew Breitbart Story

Posted on May 7, 2023 by Luke Ford

Ben Smith writes in his new book, Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral:

* Huffington’s young protégé was Andrew Breitbart, who had worked in her rotating cast of researchers and assistants back when she was a conservative. He was brilliant and frenetic, and brought both a deep knowledge of the internet and a different set of relationships in Los Angeles. Most intriguing, Andrew had a connection to Drudge himself: he was quietly running The Drudge Report eight hours a day!

* Arianna wanted Andrew Breitbart for the simple reason that he held the key to what The Huffington Post needed: traffic. Andrew was Matt Drudge’s minion—or assistant, or silent partner, depending on whom you asked. For eight hours a day, Andrew wrote and rewrote the simple HTML code that could drive one million views to an article. The Drudge Report ’s true power was that it told the story of American politics to millions, and set the agenda for news organizations whose editors and producers were forever refreshing the site.
Andrew had paid a strange, heavy price for that power—a decade of anonymity and even humiliation at the hands of his boss and idol. To most who knew him in Los Angeles, Breitbart was a frenetic, overweight fleabag of a man, an underachiever who’d grown up in Brentwood, barely made it through Tulane, and washed out in Hollywood. It was, in retrospect, classic Arianna Huffington to believe that, with only her connections and a dash of fairy dust, she could turn Andrew Breitbart into a leader at 2005’s hot new left-wing website. But she did have something to offer him: the chance to be his own man. She’d shifted her own politics, so why couldn’t he? And she and Kenny needed some of that traffic. First, though, she’d have to pry Breitbart loose from Drudge.
Andrew never forgot the moment he met Matt Drudge. It was a sunny day in the summer of 1995 when Drudge pulled his shitty little red Geo Metro onto Carroll Canal Court, a street in Venice, California, that neither man could possibly afford to live on. But Andrew’s girlfriend’s father was a famous comedian, Orson Bean, and so Andrew had invited his hero to their family’s glamorous address. Andrew was working on the fringes of Hollywood then, a rich kid back from partying his way through college, now building websites for the embarrassingly trashy E! network. Andrew had always had trouble paying attention—he was later diagnosed with ADHD—and he spent much of his day on the nascent internet, in particular on a set of bulletin boards called the Usenet. Posters on one of his favorite boards, alt.current-events.clinton.whitewater, would often cut and paste in an email digest called The Drudge Report , a list of links that included the newest political scandals, the big news of the day, and various oddities its mysterious author had uncovered. The newsletter “was like a tour of one man’s short-term memory,” Andrew later wrote. He was obsessed with its author, and finally gathered up the courage to send him an email. “Are you 50 people? A hundred people? Is there a building?” he asked.
Matt Drudge was, in fact an obscure, sallow, twenty-nine-year-old gossipmonger working as a clerk for CBS—which meant, in reality, folding T-shirts in the gift shop, eking out a living. At night, though, he was a new kind of journalist, emailing out a news digest that ranged from political scandal to early Hollywood box office numbers.
The two men connected intensely and immediately, spending four hours talking about politics and media, peering into the future from their vantage point deep inside the early internet. Drudge’s biographer Matthew Lysiak later reported that Drudge had offered Andrew a 25 percent stake in the website version of his email newsletter that he was launching. But Andrew wasn’t willing to give up his industry job, much as he hated it, for such an uncertain venture, and so they parted instead with a handshake deal that The Drudge Report would be Andrew’s side hustle. Between 9:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m., Andrew would be the one posting its links, and Matt would pay him “what he could.” Andrew was awed by the meeting. “That guy is going to change the world,” he told his girlfriend as the Geo Metro drove away.
Working for Drudge was a dream of relevance and power. From that day in 1995 forward, Andrew Breitbart had a front-row seat to the birth of the internet, as Drudge channeled the anger and resentment of their favorite talk radio host, Rush Limbaugh, into a riveting and simple page of links. There was right-wing politics and celebrity gossip, and other subtler strains that tickled America’s id: stories of loony liberals, terrifying Muslims, extreme weather, and weird science. Slowly but surely, the minor scandals that dripped out of newsrooms to the reclusive blogger became major ones. Andrew had been the silent force in the Clinton scandals, watching as the media raced to catch up with Matt’s (and his) obscure, ugly website.

* Drudge was the force Kenny Lerer and Arianna Huffington sought to rival; he was a veritable pillar of the early internet. He was powerful and famous. Andrew had some of the power, but none of the fame. He eventually quit the job at E! but still couldn’t quite explain to people what he did for a living. After Andrew married Susannah Bean and moved back to Brentwood, few of his friends and neighbors had any idea of his power. One neighbor watched the 2004 Super Bowl with him, and saw Andrew grab his laptop when Janet Jackson’s famous “wardrobe malfunction” revealed one breast. Andrew termed what she was wearing beneath it a “solar nipple medallion,” and the neighbor realized that “for the next couple of hours you could see that phrase popping up on all the broadcasts. I couldn’t believe how quickly they could influence the Zeitgeist of the world.”
Andrew also felt the excitement of the insurgent new internet, an allegiance that sometimes trumped his politics. Back then, right- and left-wingers online had a common bond: they were allied against the old establishment. So when Gawker took a shot at launching a Hollywood blog (called Defamer ) in 2004, Nick saw Andrew as an ally. “At the time, we were all bloggers of different political complexions—in opposition to a stultifying mainstream media,” Nick wrote.

* As Nick and Jonah’s competition intensified in the beginning of 2012, Andrew Breitbart felt he’d finally found his footing. Anthony Weiner’s dick, his downfall, and the election of a Republican to replace him had combined for Andrew to wash away the stain left by the Shirley Sherrod incident. Breitbart had brought a new wave of money into the company too: A low-profile hedge fund billionaire, Robert Mercer, had been taken with this new source of power, and invested $10 million. They’d put some of the cash into a splashy redesign, just like the one Nick Denton had done a year earlier to make the Gawker Media brands look bolder and less bloggy. (This stylish redesign had cost the site valuable page views. Chris Batty, the longtime ad salesman, departed over it.) Just as Nick had done, Andrew would make his blogs—initially just lists of stories, the latest first—into something glossier and more professional, with the biggest story of the day pinned to the top left corner.
Breitbart.com’s traffic, which plummeted after Drudge dropped Andrew, was coming back, starting to trickle in from Facebook. Somehow, even while Facebook trumpeted its role in the Obama campaign and its executives considered future careers in Democratic politics, Breitbart’s sort of people were on there too. Anger at the media and the Clintons, coverage of Black people committing crimes—for Andrew, it was all very promising.
But Andrew hadn’t gotten much healthier since he’d landed in the hospital during the Sherrod crisis. He was just forty-three, but he was fat and stressed, and his life was a mess. He was still riding his Vespa from Brentwood to an office in a dingy warehouse near Santa Monica. Andrew confessed to a friend that while he’d become a conservative rock star—“I could get laid in a geriatric center in flyover country”—he owed $133,000 to the Internal Revenue Service; he was still struggling to navigate the internal politics and secret flows of dark money that powered the right-wing media, including many far smaller and less successful sites.
Andrew would sometimes have a drink by himself to unwind, so there was nothing unusual about his stop on February 29, 2012, at the Brentwood, a restaurant and bar near his house. He arrived a little after 10:00 p.m., alone, for a drink. Another man at the bar, a marketing executive, recognized him and started talking politics, trying to get under Andrew’s skin by discussing recent stumbles of Republican Senate candidates. Andrew, toggling between his BlackBerry, his drink, and his new companion, engaged cheerfully, and argued that the liberal media, not the Republicans, was at fault. They parted in good spirits, agreeing to disagree.
Andrew Breitbart collapsed on the sidewalk soon afterward. He was rushed to the hospital and pronounced dead at 12:19 a.m. on Thursday, March 1, 2012. Friends at the funeral couldn’t help noticing that Matt Drudge, wearing sunglasses sunglasses throughout the ceremony, looked rested and almost absurdly fit, his biceps bulging out from beneath the sleeves of a black T-shirt.

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