Do You Know Anyone?

Perhaps she's a friend or acquaintance. Maybe he's a relative or a co-worker. They could be in their 20s or their 70s, doesn't matter. What sets them apart from other friends and other acquaintances, other relatives or other co-workers, is that they have already succumbed to a belief in fake news and conspiracy theories. They believe stuff that you realize is batshit crazy.

The problem isn't that this woman or that man has gone a little bit spinny. The problem is that they're in plentiful company and, once they've gone down this path, their powers of deduction and critical thinking atrophy, the void being filled with an appetite for conspiracy fantasies. Collectively they stand as some sort of opposition to those who adhere to evidence-based reason. By the sheer weight of their numbers they assert a degree of faux credibility that is nonetheless marketable in such fields as commerce and politics.

Fake news and conspiracy theory are having a telling effect on something very important - climate science. These pre-conditioned minds are fertile ground for the denialist community. The Guardian reports that radical right denialist web sites such as Alex Jones, Breitbart, the Drudge Report and others are drawing in the feeble minded by the scores, possibly hundreds of millions.

The problem is not that these sites exist but that not enough people seem to know the difference between actual news, fake news, partisan opinion and conspiratorial bullshit. One of those people is the president-elect of the United States.

Either that, or people don’t even care to differentiate between fake and real, especially if what they read taps into their own prejudices.

For decades, the fossil fuel industry and so-called “free market” ideologues at conservative thinktanks have misled the public on the science and the risks of climate change.

Now, the decades of material produced by that climate science denial machinery is finding a new audience. Those talking points are being reheated and screamed, in FULL CAPS.

The lady I know is university-educated and retired. She's addicted to fake news and conspiracy theories. She spreads them around on her Facebook page. I'm told she brings them up in conversation at social gatherings which has already cost her many of her oldest friends. When she is confronted, she falls back with cover lines such as 'who knows' or 'it's important to hear both sides of the story.'

Trump's "Crackpot"

The idea of Donald Trump as president has a lot of people very nervous. Why not? Trump, after all, is a bloated bag of personality quirks and psychological issues that place his fitness for the Oval Office in question.

Then there's his pick of national security advisor, retired general Michael Flynn. Forget the blind leading the blind. Let's up that to the unhinged leading the unhinged.


There may be no more dangerous choice Trump has made so far than picking Michael Flynn to be his national security adviser. There are few more important positions in the White House, and few where the wrong choice could have consequences quite as catastrophic. If we contemplate how President Trump might handle an international crisis – which he will face, probably before long – we see just how troubling Flynn's appointment is.

...Early on, Flynn was one of the only former military leaders who endorsed Trump and campaigned with him. He quickly became Trump's closest adviser on national security.

But to put it plainly, Michael Flynn is a crackpot.

...Flynn, who was head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, was fired by President Barack Obama for a number of reasons, including mismanagement. His staff got so used to him believing things that were obviously false that they began referring to them as "Flynn Facts." Nevertheless, he had a complete certainty in his own rightness.

At one meeting, reports the New York Times, "Mr Flynn said that the first thing everyone needed to know was that he was always right. His staff would know they were right, he said, when their views melded to his." Furthermore, "Some also described him as a Captain Queeg-like character, paranoid that his staff members were undercutting him and credulous of conspiracy theories."

Like Trump, Flynn has a serious Twitter problem.

"Flynn, who has 106,000 Twitter followers, has used the platform to retweet accusations that Clinton is involved with child sex trafficking and has "secretly waged war" on the Catholic Church, as well as charges that Obama is a "jihadi" who "laundered" money for Muslim terrorists."

...We can debate how troubling the spread of fake news is, and what it says about our society that people are willing to believe that Hillary Clinton is connected to a paedophilia ring. What we can't debate is that no one who believes that kind of lunacy should be allowed anywhere near the Oval Office. But Michael Flynn does. He has retweeted links to insane stories like that one, and his son and chief of staff – who may or may not be part of the Trump transition team, depending on who's answering the question at a particular moment – has gone even farther down the rabbit hole.

Here's why this is so important. The national security adviser's job is to coordinate policy between the multiple agencies whose work touches on national security – the Pentagon, the CIA, the National Security Agency, the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and others – and make sure that the president has the best, clearest, and most accurate information with which to make decisions. For a President Trump's unique combination of ignorance, inexperience and impulsiveness, it's particularly vital to have a national security adviser who can encourage calm and thoughtfulness, and not be distracted by what's irrelevant or downright false.

At some point early in his presidency, Trump is going to confront some kind of national security crisis. Every president does. Maybe it will be a terrorist attack, or a coup in a country in a volatile region, or an aggressive move by an adversary, or a conflict between two nations that the United States might get sucked into. He may have to make decisions quickly, with information that is partial and changing from hour to hour. He'll get advice from all those different people, and when it's over, Mike Flynn will be one of the last people in the room telling him what he should do. Trump trusts Flynn, and his words will carry particular weight – perhaps more than anyone else working on the crisis.

Too Stupid for Satire?

Is political satire too risky for American consumption?  Luke O'Neil argues in The New Republic that fake news has to go.

Did you hear the one about the racist NRA president? You probably did if you've been on Facebook or Twitter in the last forty-eight hours. A widely shared article from the website the Free Wood Post headlined, “NRA President Jim Porter: ‘It’s Only A Matter Of Time Before We Can Own Colored People Again,’” has been making the rounds (44,490 shares and 66,000 likes on Facebook), and rightfully so. It's an inflammatory, attention-grabbing hook that plays right into the stereotype liberals have about the people who join the NRA. The only problem here is it's obviously fake, which anyone who spent more than thirty seconds reading the article should have surmised. Even worse, the obvious fakery, so easily forgotten once you get the not-so-subtle gag, has gotten much more attention than the actually creepy things that Porter has really said about the Civil War.

“People on the Internet Are Gullible!” would probably be a much less successful headline, and this wouldn't even be worthy of mentioning if it didn't happen so often. The satire site The Daily Currant, has been pulling the same bait and switch over the past year to a similarly facepalming effect: Remember the bit about Todd Akin suggesting that breast milk could cure homosexuality? And then there's Literally Unbelievable, the Tumblr that pulls together incredibly credulous reactions to The Onion stories as if they were real. It's not just average people falling for those stories either; the list of actual news gathering organizations throughout the world being played for suckers is genuinely embarrassing. The Drudge Report galumphed its way into the media news last week, making its top link a Daily Currant story about New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg being denied a second slice of pizza at a restaurant. Back in February, The Washington Post picked up another Currant yarn about Sarah Palin joining Al Jazeera America.

I think O'Neil overstates his case.  If The Washington Post is conned by political satire the problem is with the newspaper, not the satire.  WaPo needs to up its game.  But the point O'Neil overlooks is that the American public isn't endangered by the satirical fake news sources but from mainstream fake news and opinion outlets, the powerful misinformation industry, with names like FOX News, Limbaugh, Hannity, O'Reilly, Savage and so many others.   The damage they do to the American public renders utterly insignificant the few hundreds who may actually be too gullible for political satire. 

 And, after all, isn't that what satirical fake news does, attack the mainstream misinformation industry?   Who else calls out Fox News and Limbaugh and all these other charlatans and absolutely shreds them but The Daily Show and Jon Stewart?  You won't find that scathing dissection in The New York Times or anywhere else but in satirical fake news sites.