A Lot of People Are Saying

by Nancy L. Rosenblum

  For example, Trump adopted a claim from the conspiracist website Infowars (“Scandal: Mass Media Whitewashes Islamic Terror in Berlin”) that the media were deliberately refusing to report terrorist attacks. “It’s gotten to a point where it’s not even being reported,” Trump asserted, during (of all things) a talk to military leaders at Central Command. “And in many cases the very, very dishonest press doesn’t want to report it. They have their reasons, and you understand that.”29 “Fake news” as a conspiracist charge has become a part of everyday politics: in the first year of his presidency, Trump tweeted about fake news 180 times.30 He is not alone in seeing the media itself as a conspiracy. A host of conservative broadcasters demonize the mainstream press, labeling the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and other outlets “drive-bys,” as in drive-by killers.31 In fact, the very term mainstream has become a term of abuse: it is a red line, demarking a category of journalism that is beyond the pale.

  DONALD J. TRUMP @REALDONALDTRUMP

  FAKE NEWS media knowingly doesn’t tell the truth. A great danger to our country. The failing @nytimes has become a joke. Likewise @CNN. Sad!

  10:09 PM—24 Feb 2017

  25,62425,624 Retweets 103,893103,893 likes32

  Fake news conspiracism is not a theory—it is a rallying cry. The mainstream media in Trump’s characterization is “the opposition party”33 and, worse, the “enemy of the people.”34 Here, too, rage and repetition are key to delegitimation: “I’m making this presentation directly to the American people.… The press, honestly, is out of control.… I watch CNN. It’s so much anger and hatred.… The public gets it.… They start screaming at CNN.” The next day the president tweeted, “The FAKE NEWS media (failing@nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy. It is the enemy of the American People.”35 At a South Carolina rally, he singled out the reporters covering his event: “These people back here are the worst.… They are so dishonest.… Absolute scum. Remember that. Scum. Scum. Totally dishonest people.”36 At a subsequent rally, Trump again raised the specter of violence, proclaiming that he would not execute reporters: “I hate some of these people, I hate ’em,” Trump said. “But I would never kill them.… Uh, let’s see, uh.… No, I would never do that.”37

  We quote Trump’s words at length in order to emphasize that the charge of fake news diverges from the way in which politicians regularly vilify the media. Think of Richard Nixon: “The press is the enemy,” he said, “because they’re trying to stick the knife right in our groin.”38 Nixon was speaking privately to his closest advisers; Trump is pugnaciously vilifying the press as a public enemy in public. His aim is to destroy the legitimacy of the press as an independent source of knowledge by representing it as an organized conspiracy.

  It bears saying that reporting is an irreplaceable resource for government accountability. The press provides the forum where public figures and citizens bear witness to events. There is no substitute for the service that a free press renders to democracy—a press corps that sees it as a professional responsibility to engage in a process of employing reliable sources to render an account of events that is as accurate as possible. The point of incessant charges of “fake news” is to deny standing to the press not with the comparatively benign portrait of an institution that does not care about getting things right but with the dark portrait of an institution with nefarious reasons for misleading the public. The conspiracist substitute for the standards that constitute journalistic integrity is, as we have said, repetition and the affirmation of unsupported claims. Consider this exchange between the president and conservative news anchor Bill O’Reilly. Asked whether there is any validity to reports that Trump is unable to back up his claim that three million illegal alien votes cost him the popular vote, the president replied by invoking the only source of validation that mattered: “Many people have come out and said I’m right.”39

  These conspiracist charges have an impact. “Nearly all Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (92%) think that traditional news outlets report false or misleading stories at least sometimes,” and “more than two-thirds (65%) say fake news is usually reported because ‘people have an agenda.’ ”40 The comprehensive way in which conspiracism denies standing to the press has now raised alarm even among conservatives who recognize that they went too far in the past in their attacks on the press. Charles Sykes, a conservative radio talk show host, took stock: his audience “has been conditioned to reject reporting from news sites outside of the conservative media ecosystem.” The price, he said, “turned out to be far higher than [he] imagined.” He continued, “The cumulative effect of the attacks was to delegitimize these outlets and essentially destroy much of the right’s immunity to false information. We thought we were creating a savvier, more skeptical audience. Instead, we opened the door for President Trump, who found an audience that could be easily misled.”41

  The Assault on Skepticism

  What we’ve discussed—the assault on simple fact, expert knowledge, and the press—is no secret today. Do Facts Matter?, asks the title of a recent book by two political scientists, and the implication of the question is that the place of elemental facts in public decision-making has been eroded.42 This account and others like it attribute the erosion in large part to political polarization and back-and-forth charges of partisan bias. Since the start of mass survey research, political scientists have learned how partisan bias forms a perceptual screen that distorts people’s view of the world. So does motivated reasoning and confirmation bias, which we discussed in chapter 2. All this is problematic for democratic politics, but it can be defended against. Its worst distortions are corrigible. In principle, political polarization can abate, bias can be disclosed, and facticity can be restored.

  Our point in this chapter is that the new conspiracist invention of reality introduces a different assault on knowledge. Its fabulations sever the connection between assertions and beliefs on the one hand and anything verifiable in the world on the other. This immunizes conspiracist claims from scrutiny and doubt. What follows is that the new conspiracists undercut not only knowledge but also skepticism. This matters, first, because the assault on skepticism is damaging to democracy. It is also important to refute those scholars of conspiracism who represent it as an adventurous exercise in critical thinking and radical doubt.

  A romantic characterization has it that conspiracism is a skeptical disposition. Conspiracism, the argument goes, “disrupt[s] complacent, consensual, transparent theories of politics” and involves us “in a reiterative back-and-forth that mobilizes doubt and reassurance.… The narrative pivot … involves the step away from belief and into skepticism.”43 Conspiracy entrepreneurs encourage this description. They adopt the label of critical thinkers for themselves. When the responsible media attempt to negate conspiracist narratives like Pizzagate, conspiracists accept the challenge. They characterize mainstream factual accounts as evidence of the media’s participation in the conspiracy.44 In addition, they exploit mainstream refutations as an occasion for asking, “Who do you trust?” They rebut the charge that they are fantastic propagators of “fake news” directly. On the contrary, they argue, they are the critical thinkers. As they see it, their alternative sites are teaching information consumers to be skeptical, to see themselves as “citizen journalists,” to get all the facts and make up their own minds. (As did the armed conspiracist who turned up at the pizzeria in Washington, DC, ready to “self-investigate” the alleged child sex ring.)45

  In fact, the new conspiracism is the enemy of skepticism, of intellectual humility and openness to the possibility of error and correction. As we’ve seen, its proponents deny the standing of knowledge-producing institutions and reject simple facts, expert judgment, and the reliability of researchers and journalists. They reject the resources necessary for testing their assumptions. Their certainty is at odds with skepticism; they are without residual doubt that things are as they represent them. So the new conspiracism doubles down: it
corrodes both knowledge and skepticism.

  Knowledge-producing institutions are essential to democracy; so is skepticism. Experts should not be deferred to simply because of their bona fides—their degrees or their status. Nor should the authority of knowledge-producing institutions such as the free press, the scientific community, or data- and analysis-oriented governmental agencies be accepted without question. Experts are sometimes wrong, science incomplete, and facts, theories, and explanations inaccurate—even absent corruption and bad intentions. Orthodox approaches can stifle new and better ones, and the normative assumptions and judgments behind expert claims can be hidden.

  We are aware that the processes that generate knowledge are such that what we think we know can be wrong. The processes sometimes produce failures. Think of security agencies’ intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or the deregulation of financial institutions in the 1980s and 1990s. Our best “intelligence” may be wrong; the best economists may be wrong. Beyond error, there is the possibility of corruption. Officials and sometimes entire agencies of government can turn against the people they are meant to serve, like the federal and state agencies whose bad science and cover-ups hid the egregious political decisions that allowed the public water supply in Flint, Michigan, to be contaminated with high levels of lead.46 The result was large-scale environmental injustice, and this violation of the public trust is not an isolated one.

  There are good reasons, then, for democratic citizens to withhold deference, to raise questions about experts, and to hold them accountable for their judgments. This is wholesome skepticism. Conspiracism is not skepticism. In its indiscriminate denial of standing to knowledge-producing institutions, it undercuts the basis for criticism: a commitment to evidence, impartial analysis, and ongoing research. And conspiracism undercuts the habits of doubt that empower us to question and test how we know what we think we know.

  Specialized knowledge is essential to democracy, but we acknowledge that it is also a challenge to democracy because it raises the specter of rule by experts—what philosopher Jürgen Habermas called technocracy. Our defense of knowledge-producing institutions does not imply the view that those who produce knowledge have authoritative understanding of how it should be deployed in the political world. Often what is at issue is not the scientific or philosophic truth of things as judged by the internal standards of the expert community but rather their significance and weight for the purposes of politics.47 What facts, arguments, and conclusions justify or condemn a decision is a matter of political judgment. That is why skepticism requires bridging the world of expertise and democratic politics, and it is most effective when institutions are designed to give it a place in decision-making. Toward this end, democratic theorists and public officials who champion citizen participation have imagined, designed, and experimented with venues for decision-making like “citizen juries,” “mini publics,” and “deliberative polls,” where moderators guide discussion between experts and citizen-deciders. The political theorist Zeynep Pamuk has proposed a “science court” where citizens would question experts directly, demand clarification, probe normative assumptions, and interrogate the strength of evidence and certainty of findings and their implications.48

  Albert Einstein captured the essential difference between epistemic authority and political authority in his caution about the role of expertise in democracy: “Into the village square we must carry the facts of atomic energy.… The nuclear age directly concerns every person in the civilized world.… Choices about survival depend ultimately on decisions made in the village square.”49 His point is not that citizens should be participants in nuclear physics research but rather that the use of the technology—the annihilating weapon physicists created—is properly a democratic decision. The same caution applies to the place of expertise in ordinary as well as extraordinary matters.

  Skepticism and knowledge-producing institutions go together, and the conspiracist attack on knowledge is also an attack on skepticism. Knowledge does not demand certainty; it demands doubt. Even when we are persuaded that, all things considered, the available evidence and argument point in a certain direction, even after we have resolved to go in that direction, we should be alive to the possibility that in spite of our best effort to get it right, we got it wrong. Our assurance of being right relies on doubt and an iterative process of questioning. And a plurality of knowledge-producing institutions is skepticism’s resource. The wealth of specialized knowledge, of science and social science and ethical perspectives, provides platforms from which we consider when experts are wrong, when science is incomplete, when our best understanding of facts and theories and explanations is limited or flawed, and when reasons match or don’t match the values we bring to politics. Conspiracists embrace the self-conception that they are skeptics and critical thinkers. But their own epistemic closure undercuts the capacity for skepticism. When knowledge-based pluralism is closed down, when sources are delegitimized and thrust outside the orbit of consideration, when conspiracist transmitters have lost the capacity for receiving, the framework of questioning and assurance is undone.

  Degrading Democracy

  Three degradations of democracy are the predictable result of the new conspiracist rejection of simple facts, knowledge-producing institutions, and a free press. First, absent common ground, without the possibility of a shared set of facts, standards of verification, and modes of argument, the reasons underlying decisions become illegible. Policy-making is always messy and often a matter of “muddling through,” but conspiracism makes it even more chaotic and difficult to hold to account. Misinformation, falsehood, and sheer fabulation seep in. The terrain of politics becomes quicksand. There is no mechanism for self-correction. This is a caution to officials who are politically self-serving fellow travelers in these assaults on knowledge: the conspiracist story “can be an effective political tactic. Believing your own alternative facts, however, is usually not so smart.”50

  A second consequence of conspiracist assaults on knowledge is to prepare the ground for popular acceptance of extreme actions by conspiracists in power. A conspiracist vision of terrorism and a plot to impose sharia law is presented as justification for banning Muslim immigrants and incites private citizens to intimidation and violence against Muslim Americans. A conspiracist vision of “carnage” in inner cities prepares the way for denouncing constraints on law enforcement and encouraging rough behavior by police. A conspiracist claim that the election is rigged is justification for more and more measures of voter suppression. Calling the Justice Department’s investigation into Russian interference in the election a prospective coup d’état clears the way for foreign governments to make more aggressive efforts to subvert American elections. This dynamic operates internationally. Trump’s daily repetition of the charge “fake news” has become “a cudgel for strongmen,” providing a license to autocrats and dictators to escalate their own attacks on journalists.51

  Conspiracism delivers a third assault: the disorientation that results from the steady barrage of its fabulist claims. We know from experience that the relentless challenge to our sense of reality—to our common sense—is baffling and dispiriting. Looked at more closely, we can understand that it is a special kind of attack on what it means to know something. Conspiracists, including the president, claim to own reality and to impose this reality on the nation.

  6

  Who Owns Reality?

  When political parties are delegitimized, this defining institution of democracy cannot do its work of shaping elections, representation, and the terms of political contestation. When knowledge-producing institutions are delegitimized, they cannot do their work of creating, assessing, and correcting the universe of facts and arguments we need to make decisions about politics and policy.

  Yet conspiracism’s destructive drive is not reducible to the delegitimation of political parties and of facts, experts, and knowledge-producing institutions, grave as this is. Something else is goin
g on when the new conspiracists are at the helm and have free rein in politics. This “something else” is disorientation, and here we explain the radical disorientation most people feel when confronted with a steady stream of ungrounded conspiracist claims. Closed to the world of shared understanding, conspiracism distorts what it means to know something. At a deeper level, the new conspiracists claim to own reality, and in doing so, they assault our common sense of reality. We experience a special form of anxiety and disorientation. We have been unwillingly drafted into a contest over who owns reality.

  The conspiracist in chief has the mind-set and the institutional levers to create his own reality and impose it on the nation. When conspiracists are in a position to impose their compromised sense of reality on us, they do not only produce an account of what is happening that deviates from and often inverts our understanding of the world. They also thrust us toward what we think of as the end of democratic politics, for without a shared understanding of what it means to know something and to hold a common account of the essential contours of political reality, collective political action is impossible. Common sense is the required touchstone of democratic public life, and it is under attack.

  Whom Do You Trust?

  Conspiracist fabulations have a disorienting effect on many who encounter them. What is responsible for this is the renunciation of the shared realm of facts and experience, which leaves them untethered to the world. Put simply, conspiracism pays no fealty to the common world. We have noted the self-sealing quality and resistance to contrary facts and arguments that characterize conspiracists, as well as the way they communicate their own understanding of things in the form of bare assertion. The new conspiracism is monologic, not dialogic. Or, in other terms, the new conspiracists are transmitters, not receivers.