Slouching Towards Oblivion

Showing posts with label political manipulation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label political manipulation. Show all posts

Friday, November 03, 2023

Connections

Sometimes, people go along with "theories", or religion, or other mythologies, not because they've bought into the stories, but because they want to belong - they need to fit in.

It all meshes with the phenomenon of Atheist Priests who know better than to believe in The Great & Powerful Sky Pixie, but want to make a contribution by doing good things that make miserable people a little less miserable.

There's also the pet theory of Leo Strauss - how a ruling elite have to put up a series of tales about the Great Nation, and the Great Nation's heroic past, and the Great Nation's noble fight against evil, and how a Great Nation needs good little citizens who don't question authority too much, even as they're being convinced they're the rebels, who somehow need to work diligently to maintain the status quo as planned out for them by their betters.

It doesn't have to make sense - because it's not supposed to make sense.

And the leaders don't have to believe what they're preaching. They should have pure thoughts and good intentions, but a little (or a lot) of deception in service of what's good for the unwashed masses is just pretty peachy. Cuz what the rubes don't know won't hurt them - until it's too late for them to do anything about it.

Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.


From 2006: BBC, The Power Of Nightmares:


This is a good candidate for TLDR, but it's good to get a handle on this shit, and mark it for future reference.

False witnesses
SEPTEMBER 8, 2008 BY FRED CLARK

In my past life as an evangelical for social action, I had a much-photocopied dossier in my desk drawer from the Procter & Gamble corporation. This surreal document was the company’s sadly necessary response to the urban legend that the manufacturer of Tide, Crest and Dawn was some kind of satanic cult.

Briefly, the idea was that the CEO of P&G had at some vague point in the recent past appeared on some talk show — Phil Donahue, or Sally Jesse, or Oprah, the story mutated and adapted over time — and declared that he was a Satanist and that a portion of the company’s profits were donated regularly to the Church of Satan. (If you’re not familiar with it, Snopes has a good rundown of the history of this sordid, stupid lie.)

This is a mind-bogglingly silly story. It’s not just implausible, but inconceivable, impossible. It is unbelievable on its face for dozens of reasons that become clear from even a moment’s consideration, and it’s based on factual claims that are easy to check on and quickly disproved. But we don’t need to get bogged down here in the ridiculousness of this malicious rumor, so bracket that for now, that’s not the interesting part.

Procter & Gamble had prepared the dossier to combat this zombie rumor. The company had put together its own documents disproving the story and disavowing any connection to the Evil One or to his church. They had collected letters from Donahue, Sally Jesse, Oprah and several other talk show hosts attesting that no one from the company had ever appeared on their programs, much less attempted to use such an appearance to spread the unholy gospel of Satanism. P&G had also collected an impressive array of letters from religious leaders — the archbishop of Cincinnati, Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, among others — all of whom urged their followers not to believe this stupid, stupid lie.

In retrospect, this desperate, shotgun appeal to religious authority demonstrated why the dossier itself was probably futile. It was an acknowledgment that the people they were attempting to convince were beyond the reach of mere fact or reason — people who did not find reality compelling. The only hope of persuading them, then, was to call upon religious leaders from across the spectrum in the hopes that the pronouncement of one of these random bishops and evangelical pseudo-bishops might be regarded as trustworthy.

If you’re forced to resort to such an attempt then you’ve got to realize that it’s not likely to work either. Any audience so far gone as to require this sort of argument is also likely to have already adopted the mechanisms of self-reinforcing stupidity. Thus if they read that Billy Graham denies the rumor, their response won’t be “Oh, OK, Billy Graham. I trust him,” but rather “OMG! Billy Graham is in on it too!” (cf. “biased media”)

So the dossier was hopeless, but I had yet to come to see that. Thus whenever I came across some group of evangelicals choosing to believe this rumor and spreading it to others, I would photocopy the dossier and send it to them in the hope that good information would correct their misinformation.

That was an old-school, pre-Internet method of doing something that I’m sure everyone reading this used to do via e-mail. You would receive one of those chain e-mails from a parent, friend or coworker, containing some breathless warning against a nonexistent threat. It’d take you a handful of clicks to find the Snopes page debunking the rumor and you would cut and paste the URL back into the e-mail and then hit reply-all.

I say this is something you probably used to do because, I’m guessing, you eventually realized that this approach doesn’t work. It didn’t work for me either when I sent out those photocopies of that slam-dunk, undeniable dossier from Procter & Gamble.

The dossier/Snopes approach doesn’t work because it attempts to apply facts and reason to people who are not interested in either facts or reason. That’s not a nice thing to say, or even to think, about anyone else, which is why I was reluctant and slow to reach that conclusion. But that conclusion was inevitable.

In trying to combat the P&G slander with nothing more than irrefutable facts proving it false, I was operating under a set of false assumptions. Among these:

1. I assumed that the people who claimed to believe that Procter & Gamble supported the Church of Satan really did believe such a thing.

2. I assumed that they were passing on this rumor in good faith — that they were misinforming others only because they had, themselves, been misinformed.

3. I assumed that they would respect, or care about, or at least be willing to consider, the actual facts of the matter.

4. Because the people spreading this rumor claimed to be horrified/angry about its allegations, I assumed that they would be happy/relieved to learn that these allegations were, indisputably, not true.

All of those assumptions proved to be false. All of them. This was at first bewildering, then disappointing, and then, the more I thought about it, appalling — so appalling that I was reluctant to accept that it could really be the case.

But it is the case. Let’s go through that list again. The following are all true of the people spreading the Procter & Gamble rumor:

1. They didn’t really believe it themselves.

2. They were passing it along with the intent of misinforming others. Deliberately.

3. They did not respect, or care about, the actual facts of the matter, except to the extent that they viewed such facts with hostility.

4. Being told that the Bad Thing they were purportedly upset about wasn’t real only made them more upset. Proof that the 23rd largest corporation in America was not in league with the Devil made them defensive and very, very angry.

Again, I’m not happy to be saying such things about anyone, and I’m only doing so here reluctantly, yet this is the appalling truth.

Maybe you’re also a bit reluctant to accept this. Maybe you’re thinking Hanlon’s/Heinlein’s Razor should apply — the axiom that reminds us to “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”

I wish that applied here. As I said above, I spent a long time distributing that dossier on that assumption that I was, in fact, dealing with stupidity rather than malice. But the spreading of this rumor cannot be adequately explained by stupidity. Stupidity alone doesn’t make one hostile to irrefutable facts. Stupidity cannot account for their vicious anger when the rumor is debunked — anger at the person doing the debunking, and anger at the whole world for not turning out to be the nightmare they wanted it to be.

But in any case, no one is stupid enough to really believe such a story. The coworkers or relatives who fill your inbox with urban legends and hoaxes may not be the sharpest tools in the shed, but none of them is stupid enough to believe this. And neither are those people who claim that they do believe it.

Go back and unbracket all of the implausibilities and impossibilities of this story. It just makes no sense. Why would a member of a secret evil society of evil go on national TV to tell the world about it? And why would this proudly evil company now deny the very same thing? Why does the name of the TV host keep changing while the CEO himself is never named? And how come no one can seem to find anyone who actually saw this alleged broadcast? And …

And why are we even bothering to discuss the holes in this story? It’s nothing but holes. Any one of those holes should stop the hearer short, preventing them from passing this ridiculous story along and adding their approval to it.

If a person is smart enough to comprehend this story and then to repeat it, then that person is, by definition, not stupid enough to really believe it.

I used to believe that maybe some people were that stupid. They were acting that stupid, so I went along. I believed that the people I was sending that dossier to were merely innocent dupes.

But in truth they were neither innocent nor dupes. The category of innocent dupe does not apply here. No one could be honestly misled by such a story. The only way to have been misled by it is dishonestly — which is to say deliberately, willingly and willfully. They are claiming to believe a foolish thing, but they are not guilty of foolishness. They are guilty of malice.

They are just plain guilty.

Which brings us to the interesting and complicated question: Why? Why would anyone choose to pretend to believe such preposterous and malicious falsehoods? What’s in it for them?

For some few of them, the answer to that doesn’t turn out to be all that complicated or all that interesting. They did it for money.

The P&G rumor seems to have originated among rival soap-sellers — people affiliated with a giant multilevel marketing scheme with roots in the evangelical subculture (it rhymes with “Spam Ray”). Their marketing model is based on old-fashioned social networking, which partly accounts for why the rumor remains so widespread among American evangelicals. It also explains why the rumor seems to have been tailored to appeal to evangelicals in particular — with the CEO allegedly declaring his allegiance to the Church of Satan rather than to, say, the American Nazi Party or the Klan or communism.

The people who created this rumor, in other words, employed it as a way of convincing prospective buyers to purchase their detergent instead of Tide because Tide worships the Devil. That seems hamfisted and over-the-top doesn’t it? A vaguer, less extreme rumor might have seemed likelier to work better — something subtler than the ultimate trump card of claiming that P&G was literally in league with Satan.

But the rumor was effective. Spectacularly effective. It went viral years before most of us had ever thought to use that term that way. And it lives on, still surfacing and resurfacing after decades spent trying to kill it through truth-telling dossiers and aggressive litigation.

Confronted with the runaway success of such an absurd and over-the-top claim, the reflexive response is to think something like, “Wow, a lot of people really are gullible and stupid.” But again — and this is my point here — this has nothing to do with either stupidity or gullibility. The widespread promotion and pretend-acceptance of this rumor cannot be adequately explained by stupidity. It can only be attributed to malice.

This story, as with the many others like it, is spread maliciously. The people spreading it are not fools. They are not suffering from a mental defect, but from a moral one. They have chosen to bear false witness, and they do so knowingly.

So money was one motive for those who first created and began to spread the P&G rumor. Theirs is the easiest case. Greed is relatively mundane and uncomplicated. But what of the others, what of those who pretend to believe this rumor and enthusiastically spread it to others without the possibility of financial benefit?

Theirs is a far more complicated, and more interesting, situation. Too complicated to get into this morning, so this post will have to have a Part 2.

False Witnesses 2
OCTOBER 8, 2008 BY FRED CLARK

“If you want to look thin, you hang out with fat people.”
— Thornton Melon

Commenters on the previous post about this rumor were right to argue that I overstated the case in saying that there could be no “innocent dupes” involved in its spread. That’s too categorical. But those few who may have been innocently duped by such an unbelievable tale — the very young, the very old, the very insular — weren’t also among those most active in spreading the rumor. They heard it, and they may have believed it, but believing false witness and bearing false witness are not the same thing. It is those bearers of false witness I’m interested in here.

Those spreading this rumor can be divided into two categories: Those who know it to be false, but spread it anyway, and those who suspect it might be false, but spread it anyway. The latter may be dupes, but they are not innocent. We might think of them as complicit dupes. The former group, the deliberate liars, are making an explicit choice to spread what they know to be lies. The complicit dupes are making a subtler choice — choosing to ignore their suspicion that this story just doesn’t add up and then choosing to pass it along anyway because confirming that it’s not true would be somehow disappointing and would prevent them from passing it along without explicitly becoming deliberate liars, which would make them uncomfortable.

What I want to explore here is why anyone would make either of those choices. In both cases, the spreading of this rumor seems less an attempt to deceive others than a kind of invitation to participate in deception. The enduring popularity of this rumor shows that many people see this invitation as something attractive and choose to accept it, so I also want to explore why anyone would choose to do that.

To briefly review the details of this absurd rumor, the claim was that some nameless CEO of Procter & Gamble appeared on some daytime talk show and declared his allegiance to Satan. This unidentified and unidentifiable Fortune 100 executive told Donahue/Oprah/Sally Jesse that he belonged to a Church of Satan, and that a portion of the company’s profits — every dollar collected from the sale of Tide and Dawn and Crest — went to support its evil agenda.

The origin and organization of this slanderous tale seems to trace back to P&G’s would-be rivals in a cult-like multi-level marketing scheme that coveted the Cincinnati-based company’s market share. That’s a sleazy tactic — marketing by smear campaign — and it betrays a lack of confidence in the quality of the rival product line, but one can appreciate the perverse logic at work. There was money at stake. If the rivals could create a negative association with P&G’s product line, then it would make their own products seem more attractive by contrast.

Such whisper campaigns needn’t be terribly plausible. They work by connotation and association. For every possible X number of people who actually come to believe that P&G supports the work of Satan there will be 3X people who come away with some dim, unexplored sense that the company is “controversial” or vaguely associated with something unsavory (think “Swift Boat”).

The motive of this small core-group of rumor-mongers is thus not terribly complicated or difficult to understand. It’s not even terribly interesting. They were lying for the sake of money. Nothing novel or remarkable about that.

Far more interesting than those greedy sleazeballs, though, are the members of the much larger group of gossips who enthusiastically spread this malicious and obviously false story. This larger group has no financial interest at stake, so what’s in it for them? What motivates someone to accept the invitation to participate in deception, to accept an obvious lie and then to voluntarily tie their own credibility to something so incredible?

To try to understand these cheerful gossips, I’d like to turn to an equally strange, if less malicious, group of enthusiasts — the Anti Kitten-Burning Coalition.

Every once in a while, I am sorry to say, some sick bastard sets fire to a kitten. This is something that happens. Like all crimes, it shouldn’t happen, but it does. And like most crimes, it makes the paper. The effects of this appalling cruelty are not far-reaching, but the incidents are reported in the papers because the cruelty is so flagrant and acute that it seems newsworthy.

The response to such reports is horror and indignation, which is both natural and appropriate. But the expression of that horror and indignation also produces something strange.

A few years ago there was a particularly horrifying kitten-burning incident involving a barbecue grill and, astonishingly, a video camera. That sordid episode took place far from the place where I work, yet the paper’s editorial board nonetheless felt compelled to editorialize on the subject. They were, happily, against it. Unambiguously so. It’s one of the very few instances I recall when that timidly Broderian bunch took an unambiguous stance without their habitual on-the-other-hand qualifications.

I agreed with that stance, of course. Who doesn’t? But despite agreeing with the side they took, I couldn’t help but be amused by the editorial’s inordinately proud pose of courageous truth-telling. The lowest common denominator of minimal morality was being held up as though it were a prophetic example of speaking truth to power.

That same posturing resurfaced in a big way earlier this year when the kitten-burners struck again, much closer to home. A group of disturbed and disturbing children doused a kitten with lighter fluid and set it on fire just a few miles from the paper’s offices.

The paper covered the story, of course, and our readers ate it up.

People loved that story. It became one of the most-read and most-e-mailed stories on our Web site. Online readers left dozens of comments and we got letters to the editor on the subject for months afterward.

Those letters and comments were uniformly and universally opposed to kitten-burning. Opinon on that question was unanimous and vehement.

But here was the weird part: Most of the commenters and letter-writers didn’t seem to notice that they were expressing a unanimous and noncontroversial sentiment. Their comments and letters were contentious and sort of aggressively defensive. Or maybe defensively aggressive. They were angry, and that anger didn’t seem to be directed only at the kitten-burners, but also at some larger group of others whom they imagined must condone this sort of thing.

If you jumped into the comments thread and started reading at any random point in the middle, you’d get the impression that the comments immediately preceding must have offered a vigorous defense of kitten-burning. No such comments offering any such defense existed, and yet reader after reader seemed to be responding to or anticipating this phantom kitten-burning advocacy group.

One came away from that comment thread with the unsurprising but reassuring sense that the good people reading the paper’s Web site did not approve of burning kittens alive. Kitten-burning, they all insisted, was just plain wrong.

But one also came away from reading that thread with the sense that people seemed to think this ultra-minimal moral stance made them exceptional and exceptionally righteous. Like the earlier editorial writers, they seemed to think they were exhibiting courage by taking a bold position on a matter of great controversy. Whatever comfort might be gleaned from the reaffirmation that most people were right about this non-issue issue was overshadowed by the discomfiting realization that so many people also seemed to want or need most others to be wrong.

The kitten-burners seem to fulfill some urgent need. They give us someone we can clearly and correctly say we’re better than. Their extravagant cruelty makes us feel better about ourselves because we know that we would never do what they have done. They thus function as signposts of depravity, reassuring the rest of us that we’re Not As Bad As them, and thus letting us tell ourselves that this is the same thing as us being good.

Kitten-burners are particularly useful in this role because their atrocious behavior seems wholly alien and without any discernible motive that we might recognize in ourselves. We’re all at least dimly aware of our own potential capacity for the seven deadlies, so crimes motivated by lust, greed, gluttony, etc. — even when those crimes are particularly extreme — still contain the seed of something recognizable. People like Ken Lay or Hugh Hefner don’t work as signposts of depravity because we’re capable, on some level, of envying them for their greed and their hedonism. But we’re not the least bit jealous of the kitten-burners. Their cruelty seems both arbitrary and unrewarding, allowing us to condemn it without reservation.

Again, I whole-heartedly agree that kitten-burning is really, really bad. But the leap from “that’s bad” to “I’m not that bad” is dangerous and corrosive. I like to call this Thornton Melon morality. Melon was the character played by Rodney Dangerfield in the movie Back to School, the wealthy owner of a chain of “Tall & Fat” clothing stores whose motto was “If you want to look thin, you hang out with fat people.” That approach — finding people we can compare-down to — might make us feel a little better about ourselves, but it doesn’t change who or what we really are. The Thornton Melon approach might make us look thin, but it won’t help us become so. Melon morality is never anything more than an optical illusion.

This comparing-down is ultimately corrosive because it bases our sense of morality in pride rather than in love — in the cardinal vice instead of the cardinal virtue. And to fuel that pride, we end up looking for ever-more extreme and exotically awful people to compare ourselves favorably against, people whose freakish cruelty makes our own mediocrity show more goodly and attract more eyes than that which hath no foil to set it off.

Melon morality is why if the kitten-burners didn’t already exist, we would have to invent them.

And, of course, we do invent them. After a while the buzz of pride we get from comparing ourselves to the kitten-burners begins to fade and we start looking for a stronger drug. Who could possibly be even worse than the kitten-burners?

How about Satan-worshippers?

In the first post on this topic, I mentioned that the Church of Satan aspect of the Procter & Gamble rumor seemed a bit too outrageous and over-the-top. But while that outrageousness makes the story less plausible, it’s also what makes it so compelling. The pride that fuels Melon morality is an addictive drug, and the mythological Satan-worshippers of the P&G rumor offer that drug in its purest form.

Whether or not there actually is any such thing as the or a Church of Satan needn’t concern us here. This story has nothing to do with any actual religion or cult or the actual doctrines espoused by Anton LaVey or any other publicity-seeking character who has claimed the name of Satanism. This story isn’t about that. It’s about the idea of Satanism — the lore and legends of this enduringly popular bogeyman.

That lore does not arise from or relate to any actual belief system or actual believers. It is, rather, the stuff of legend as recounted in a hundred Jack Chick tracts and heavy metal album covers, in urban legends and campfire stories, in the flim-flammery of Mike Warnke and Bob Larson, and in low-budget Z-movies like the classic Satan’s Cheerleaders.

From sources like those, you already know the basic outlines of “Satanist” lore. Black robes, candles, pentagrams and strangely shaped knives feature prominently. Those knives, of course, are used for ritual human sacrifice.

The very idea of ritual human sacrifice is shocking and horrifying, which is why it tends to be included in stories told by people seeking to shock and horrify. When that is your aim as a storyteller the tendency is to constantly up the ante. What could be more shocking and horrifying than ritual human sacrifice? How about the torturous ritual sacrifice of children? And what could be even worse than that? The sacrifice of babies.

This is what “Satanist” signifies in the P&G rumor. It means people who kill babies — sweet, innocent, adorable little babies. Here, from the article linked above, is an excerpt from a 1991 fundraising letter from the Anti-Satanist “ministry” of con artist Bob Larson:

I watched them rip apart a newborn baby and take the heart while it was still beating. I can’t forget the screams. I still hear them every night!

That’s supposedly eyewitness testimony from someone saved out of the depraved Church of Satan thanks to the ministry of Bob Larson. It reads more like something out of a horror story than like something out of a fundraising solicitation for a Christian ministry. It’s not quite a horror story, but it works in a similar way.

Satanist stories, much like stories about ghosts or vampires, tap into big mythic fears — the sense that there is real evil in the world, that the innocent often suffer, that we may be powerless against the powerful. We tell such stories because we are afraid — reasonably afraid — of powerful, unnameable things. These stories give those fears a shape and a name and a horrifying face, and somehow that can be more reassuring than allowing such fears to remain amorphous and existential.

And just like vampire and ghost stories, Satanist stories have their own sets of rules, details and basic outlines with which we’re all familiar. These give the stories their own kind of reality. (Ask most people, “Do you believe in vampires?” and they will answer No. But ask those same people if vampires can be killed with a wooden stake and they’ll tell you Yes.)

None of these stories work as stories if we undercut their impact by acknowledging that there’s no such thing as ghosts or vampires or Satanic detergent executives. To tell these stories well, we have to pretend these things are real. To hear these stories well, our readers have to agree to go along. This is a familiar, but dramatically necessary, convention in horror stories from Sleepy Hollow to Amityville. This conceit usually involves only the willing suspension of disbelief, but for those who really get caught up in them — those particularly afraid already — that storytelling suspension of disbelief can turn into the expulsion of disbelief, the abandonment of skepticism in real life. The fearful and the fear-prone come to almost believe that the ghost stories and urban legends are really true. They come to almost really believe that someone out there is really killing the innocent little babies. (Almost.)

So maybe that’s all we’re dealing with when it comes to the P&G rumor — the same mixture of storytelling and suspension of disbelief, with the usual subset of listeners/readers who fail to make that distinction. Maybe the people passing along this rumor are no more malicious than that gullible friend of yours who still thinks The Blair Witch Project was a documentary.

Maybe. Maybe for some few of them. But the problem with this horror-story explanation is that the P&G rumor isn’t told the way we tell horror stories and ghost stories. It’s told in well-lit supermarkets and Sunday schools, not in dark rooms just before or just after bedtime. And it isn’t really told as a story at all. It’s presented, instead, as more of an argument or a lecture, the way someone might tell you, for example, why you shouldn’t eat foie gras.

In it’s usual forms, the P&G rumor is told and retold without any of the flair or artful detail that we expect from storytelling. I’m not sure it even qualifies to be grouped in with urban legends. Compare it to any of the stories we usually think of as urban legends — the subcutaneous spider-eggs story or the missing-kidneys and bathtub-of-ice story — and it just doesn’t measure up. Those stories are retold, in part, because you don’t have to believe them to appreciate that they’re good stories. The P&G rumor, by contrast, is implausible and unforgivably dull. It’s just not a very good story.

But while the P&G rumor can’t really be considered a horror story, it is clearly about horror or, at least, about fear. Consider, for example, the variation of the rumor that Snopes provides on their page debunking it. Try to count all the things the author of this particular lie is afraid of:

PLEASE MAKE A DIFFERENCE

The President of Procter & gamble appeared on the Phil Donahue Show on March 1, 1994. He announced that due to the openness of our society, he was coming out of the closet about his association with the church of Satan. He stated that a large portion of his profits from Procter & Gamble Products goes to support this satanic church. When asked by Donahue if stating this on t.v. would hurt his business, he replied, “THERE ARE NOT ENOUGH CHRISTIANS IN THE UNITED STATES TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE.”


That’s as pure a distillation as you will ever find of the nightmares and bogeymen that terrify the religious right, complete with the attempt to justify those fears because those people are really Satan-worshipping baby-killers.

Perhaps the deepest fear lurking in that e-mail has to do with the persecution complex of American evangelicals we’ve often discussed here before. The fear here is not that Christians in America might face persecution, but rather the fear of what it might mean that they don’t. The supposed effort to prove that there are ENOUGH CHRISTIANS … TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE is an expression of the fear — or the recognition — that the people sending and resending this e-mail are not CHRISTIAN ENOUGH TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE. They’re shouting because they’re frightened — truly frightened of the truth about themselves, which is always far more frightening than any fear of what might be lurking outside ourselves in the dark.

The response to that fear is a desperate grasping at Melon morality in the most extreme form they can imagine — trying to prove to themselves that they are different enough to MAKE A DIFFERENCE by contrasting themselves with baby-killing Satan-worshippers. With baby-killing Satan-worshippers that they know are purely imaginary.

That requires more self-deception than any of us is capable of on our own. That degree of self-deception requires a group.

This is why the rumor doesn’t really need to be plausible or believable. It isn’t intended to deceive others. It’s intended to invite others to participate with you in deception.

Are you afraid you might be a coward? Join us in pretending to believe this lie and you can pretend to feel brave. Are you afraid that your life is meaningless? Join us in pretending to believe this lie and you can pretend your life has purpose. Are you afraid you’re mired in mediocrity? Join us in pretending to believe this lie and you can pretend to feel exceptional. Are you worried that you won’t be able to forget that you’re just pretending and that all those good feelings will thus seem hollow and empty? Join us and we will pretend it’s true for you if you will pretend it’s true for us. We need each other.

You can’t be doing well if it seems like an improvement to base your life and your sense of self on a demonizing slander that you know is only a fantasy. To challenge that fantasy, to identify it as nothing more than that, is to threaten to send them back to whatever their lives were like before they latched onto this desperate alternative.

That suggests to me that if we are to have any hope of disabusing them of their fantasies, then we will need to recommend some third alternative, something other than the lie or the reality that had seemed even worse.


Wednesday, July 05, 2023

Today's MAGAt


Yup. Before the COVID vax, there were no strokes, no heart attacks, no deep vein thrombosis, no clot-related organ failure or pregnancy problems at all. Ever.

And, oh yeah - don't forget - everybody bled to death when they got even a minor cut or puncture wound, cuz - you know - no blood clotting.

I know, I know, she was just being a little over-the-top.

So maybe we can chalk it up to the very standard propaganda technique of Generalization.

Or maybe it's the obvious ...


That's probably not the case either.

Most of these Twitterati jagoffs are not stupid. But they are manipulative hucksters who play to an audience of rubes they don't respect, who either are actually that stupid and they swallow every little turd that floats by, or they're pretending it's just a big joke to get the Libs all riled up so as to keep all of us distracted while they're busy strip-mining everything from this and the next world - which they think makes them oh so gosh-darned clever. Wink wink nudge nudge. All the way to the bank. Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.

And never mind the middling probability that an awful lot of the big "influencers" on Twitter (and other social media platforms) are either bots themselves, or have had their popularity way over-inflated because of bots created specifically for the purpose of Band Wagon propaganda.

Whoa - it just now occurred to me that "social media" can be abbreviated as: S/M.

Coincidence? 🤨

Saturday, May 13, 2023

The Republican Central Planning Committee


Having met with some "success" at legislating profits over the last 20 or 30 years, Republicans aren't trying to hide their shit anymore - on practically anything.

We're "anti-woman"?
Fuckin' ay right we are - here's 200 new laws that have been either proposed or passed making it illegal to seek an abortion, illegal to travel out of state for an abortion, illegal to buy an abortion pill, illegal to help a woman with any of the above.

We're racist assholes?
Damn straight. We're busing brown immigrants - no matter their status - out of state - cuz we don't like them and we don't want them here.
We "back the blue" whenever they're stomping on brown people.

We're anti-democracy?
What was your first clue?
Closing precincts where lots of Democrats vote?
Making it OK for the Texas AG to throw out the polling results in the single largest Democrat-heavy county?
Moving to kill early and mail-in voting?
Eliminating college campus voting?

And on it goes ad infinitum, ad nauseam, but particularly on economic issues the last few months.

So is it any wonder they're making moves to permanently ensure profitability in a few of their favorite kinds of businesses, while trying to put up a facade of "getting to the bottom of this", and actually making it illegal to consider anything but good little fascist criteria when deciding what investments are best for a given client?


Opinion
The day free-market Republicans became Soviet economic planners

Can you remember when Republicans still believed in the free market?

It was sometime before Donald Trump started routine attacks on the “globalists” of Goldman Sachs and the leaders of large U.S. corporations; before Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis used tax policy to attack the Walt Disney Co. because it dared to disagree with his “don’t say gay” legislation; before congressional Republicans harassed social media companies and book publishers over alleged “censorship” of their views; before they threatened Delta Air Lines, United Airlines and Major League Baseball over their support for voting rights; before they vowed to use federal resources to retaliate against the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for backing a few Democrats; before Republican governors enacted laws overriding private employers’ coronavirus vaccination policies; and before GOP-led states moved to disrupt interstate commerce to block abortion access and morning-after pills.

This week brought the latest evidence that the former party of laissez-faire capitalism has reimagined itself in the image of a Soviet State Planning Committee. Republican lawmakers are now telling investors which businesses they can and can’t invest in — and which investment criteria they will be permitted to consider.

The House Oversight Committee staged a hearing to denounce asset managers for using “environmental, social and governance” criteria, or ESG, when making their investments — and to plot ways to stop investors from doing this terrible thing.

“An unelected cabal of global elites are using ESG, a woke economic strategy, to hijack our capitalist system,” declared an overwrought Steve Marshall, Alabama attorney general and one of two GOP expert witnesses at the anti-investor hearing. For those who didn’t understand him the first time, Marshall used the word “elites” 13 times and “woke” 20 times in his opening testimony.

The other GOP witness, Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes, declared that there exists a “conspiracy” of ESG-minded investors. He was particularly worried that “asset managers who collectively own significant percentages of utilities’ stock are improperly influencing the operations of those utilities.”

Imagine that! The shareholders who own a company are trying to influence its operations! Will nobody rid us of this capitalist menace?

Legislatures in several red states have passed laws, championed by oil, gas and coal companies, that essentially pull state pension funds from investment managers unless they invest in — you guessed it — oil, gas and coal companies. Similar laws bar pension plans from working with investment firms that use ESG standards when deciding whether to invest in companies that trash the planet, abuse their workers or kill their customers. Led by Marshall and Reyes, 25 state attorneys general sued the Biden administration to block a regulation that allows retirement-plan investors to consider ESG standards. The rule doesn’t mandate that investors do so. It merely gives them the option.

The Democrats’ witness, Illinois treasurer Michael Frerichs, called the Republicans’ schemes “anti-free market and anti-investor.” The GOP officials would block asset managers from even considering whether a car company “is aligned with market expectations and preparing for the shift to electric vehicles,” whether a pharmaceutical company “has exposure to massive lawsuits because of its role in the opioid epidemic” or whether “health-care companies understaff their operations and jeopardize the safety of patients.” Said Frerichs: “ESG is simply additional information that investment professionals use to assess risk and return prospects.”

Apparently, a lot of investors agree with him, because the accountancy PwC expects ESG-related assets under management to grow to $33.9 trillion by 2026, or about one-fifth of the worldwide asset-management total. ESG, lamented Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.), “is gaining ground on Wall Street.”

And Republicans are determined to stop the free market — no matter how much it costs.

A study by the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and a Fed economist, for example, calculated that an anti-ESG law in Texas will cost the state $303 million to $532 million in additional interest annually. The Kansas Public Employees Retirement System said anti-ESG legislation there could cause more than $1 billion in losses from early sale of assets and reduce returns by $3.6 billion over a decade. Public pension systems in Arkansas said an anti-ESG bill there would cause them to lose at least $37 million per year.

In the end, the GOP’s anti-capitalist binge is about culture, not economics. Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) expressed his concern that ESG considerations would work against “certain disfavored groups in our society. People don’t like men. People don’t like people of European background.” ESG investors, he argued, “are the type of people who judge people by where their great-great-grandparents came from.” Other Republicans on the panel used their time to denounce the perceived “woke” wrongs of JPMorgan Chase, Nike, Anheuser-Busch and others.

Frerichs, a Democrat, pointed out the absurdity “of me defending the free market against a Republican legislature trying to have a planned economy mandating what businesses have to invest in.”

But the irony was lost on Comer, who tried to draw a link between his anti-capitalist crusade and his simultaneous attempt to prove wrongdoing by President Biden and his family. “We just had a press conference and showed bank records that showed the Biden family getting millions of dollars from places like China,” he said. “I wonder what types of ESG policies China” has.

China doesn’t have ESG standards, Mr. Chairman. It’s an authoritarian country with a state-run economy. Our free-market economy, which lets investors make choices free of the heavy hand of government, is vastly superior. I remember when Republicans used to think so, too.

When he isn’t laying waste to the capitalist system as a whole, Comer has been trying his all to take down a particular subset of capitalists: those with the surname “Biden.”

The chief Hunter hunter in the House, Comer had for weeks been hyping his investigation into business dealings by Hunter Biden and numerous other Bidens, suggesting that he finally had the goods on the “big guy” himself, President Biden.

“Joe Biden’s going to have a lot of explaining to do,” Comer teased on Fox News on April 11, promising a blockbuster news conference within two weeks. He claimed his subpoenas of bank records had uncovered “influence peddling” at high levels.

A week later, he claimed to have evidence that “10 or 12 Biden family members” were involved in “taking money from our adversaries around the world” and that “these adversaries were getting something in return” from Joe Biden.

On April 23, he told Fox News that he would “very soon” have a news conference at which he would detail the “influence peddling scheme” that he now claimed involved “at least 12” Bidens. Tossing out the words “launder,” “deceive the IRS” and “foreign agent,” he said multiple Bidens should be indicted, and he teased that the president himself might be “compromised.”

Then, on Tuesday, Comer told Fox News that “tomorrow is going to be judgment day for the Biden administration, the Biden White House.”

And so, after a month of hype, Comer and other Oversight Committee Republicans walked into the House television studio Wednesday and revealed … a whole lot of nothing.

He had not presented any evidence of wrongdoing by the president. He hadn’t presented evidence that the elder Biden — “the big guy” — had any involvement in his son Hunter’s businesses. Comer’s months of digging through bank records had found more than $10 million in payments from companies run by foreign nationals that went to Biden family members and business associates and their companies. But Comer produced no evidence that these payments were illegal or that any official government actions were taken in exchange.

The only thing he had to offer was more innuendo. “It would be hard for me to believe” that there was no official quid pro quo, he said, and “we believe that the president has been involved.” Said Comer: “We’re going to continue to look.”

After unwrapping his nothingburger, Comer gave the first question to a friendly reporter from the Murdoch New York Post. But even he sounded skeptical. Comer gave the second question to the Epoch Times, a far-right publication that traffics in conspiracy theories.

The reviews, even from the right, were savage. “I’m not impressed with James Comer’s Biden bombshell,” tweeted former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka.

Geraldo Rivera said Comer and colleagues were “struggling to find direct evidence of criminal conduct or corruption.” He said the investigators need to “put up … or shut up.”

On “Fox & Friends,” Comer got a dressing-down from host Steve Doocy. The charge of influence peddling is “just your suggestion,” he told Comer on Thursday morning. “You don’t actually have any facts to that point. You’ve got some circumstantial evidence. And the other thing is … there’s no evidence that Joe Biden did anything illegally.”

Comer had nothing. “Make no mistake, Joe Biden was involved,” he promised.

Just take his word for it.

On the other side of the Capitol, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), another avid Hunter hunter, offered this explanation for the latest failure to produce evidence of wrongdoing: “People that commit criminal acts try not to leave a paper trail.” So the lack of anything incriminating merely proves that the Bidens were very good criminals! “You have to infer these things,” Johnson told Fox Business. “You’re not necessarily going to get necessarily hard proof.”

Of course, if Comer is going to “infer” guilt based on the $10 million in foreign funds received by Biden family members and business associates over 15 years, he would also have to infer that Trump family members, who have received hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign payments since his election, are more guilty by orders of magnitude.

Alternatively, we can all infer that Comer is not very good at this, that Biden hasn’t done anything wrong — or, most likely, both.

Grand juries aren’t generally known for their comic timing, but you’ve got to give credit to the one that just indicted Rep. George Santos.

The jurors, sitting in Central Islip, N.Y., returned their indictment of the Long Island Republican on Tuesday, charging Santos with, among other things, “fraudulent application for and receipt of unemployment benefits.”

The very next day, House Republicans began debate on the House floor of H.R. 1163, the Protecting Taxpayers and Victims of Unemployment Fraud Act.

One of the 35 co-sponsors of the bill? George Anthony Devolder Santos.

“The Protecting Taxpayers and Victims of Unemployment Fraud Act takes much needed overdue action to recover fraudulently paid covid benefits … and prosecute the criminals responsible,” proclaimed the irony-challenged Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.), chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.

If House Republicans really wanted to take a stand against unemployment fraud, they could expel Santos, who is accused of defrauding taxpayers of almost $25,000 in unemployment benefits during the pandemic while he earned a salary of approximately $120,000. But they need his vote.

Outside the courthouse after his arraignment Wednesday, Santos thanked House Republican leadership for standing by him. “I appreciate leadership for being patient,” he said, telling reporters, “I have to go back and vote tomorrow.”

And that he did. The House passed the unemployment fraud bill Thursday afternoon on a mostly party-line vote. Among the “ayes” was Santos.

There are three weeks to go until the United States defaults on its debt. Let’s check in on where Republican leaders stand.

“The solution to this problem lies with two people, the president of the United States … and the speaker of the House.” — Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in the White House driveway on May 9.

“That would come down really to Chuck Schumer and the president.” — House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in the White House driveway, two minutes later.

“Well, you might as well do it [default] now.” — Former president Donald Trump, May 10.

Odd how the GOP is suddenly all in for the government picking winners and losers.

Tuesday, April 18, 2023

When Coincidence Is Not Coincidence


I try to be careful not to do a Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc on these things, but I think I have good reason to say you'll never convince me that this:


New York Is a Hellscape, Republicans Say. A Cabby Told Them So.
A look at the stagecraft behind the House Judiciary Committee hearing on “Victims of Violent Crime in Manhattan.”

... and this:


Republicans Are Using Paul Pelosi Attack to Target Democrats on Crime
Republicans and conservative figures have taken aim at Democrats over crime following an attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

... can't possibly be linked to this:


84-Year-Old Is Charged in Shooting of Black Teenager Who Went to Wrong House
Lawyers for the family of Ralph Yarl, 16, said he was critically injured when he was shot twice in Kansas City, Mo.

... and this:


Man Charged With Murder in Shooting of Woman Who Went Up Wrong Driveway
Kevin Monahan shot Kaylin Gillis, 20, when she and several friends wound up outside his house in a rural part of upstate New York, the authorities said.

When so many Americans are being pounded every day with the hatred and paranoia coming from outlets like DumFux News and OAN and Breitbart (and and and), we have to consider the probabilities for deliberate purposeful mayhem.

So we have to acknowledge that there could be a stochastic method to this madness. 

ie: Somebody wants this shit to happen, and it's not just a matter of the NRA selling more guns, and buying political power thru the purchase of more Coin-Operated Politicians.

I can't shake the feeling there's quite a bit more to it than simply Commercial-Interests-At-Any-Cost.

Prove me wrong
Let's hash it out

Monday, October 17, 2022

What Hath Fox Wrought

She makes the point that we all have to understand, and internalize, and get used to: The rubes will line up - by the millions - and vote the way they're told to vote.


Desi Lydic - The Daily Show on Comedy Central

Monday, September 26, 2022

Why All The Fuss?

This aired last night on MeTV:


Not my cup of meat, but I'm not going to get any knots in my Underoos over it.

The Ed Sullivan Show was not exactly out there on the fringe - this was as mainstream as it gets in 1970 - prime time every Sunday.

Ain't nuthin' new about no drag show. 

So I have to ask why it seems there's this sudden urgent need to be alarmed. So a local fire fighter - or a shoe store clerk - or any random guy - decides he'll dress up like Barbra Streisand and read a coupla cute stories to a rapt audience of 2nd graders. So fuckin' what?

I wonder who might feel the need to manipulate people into being frightened by a form of entertainment that's been around for centuries.

Tuesday, September 20, 2022

MAGA Manipulation

Sometimes, The Young Turks are a little over the top - sometimes they're a lot over the top.

I don't think that's the case with this one.


Max Burns - MAGA morons have no idea what's going on

Wednesday, August 03, 2022

Time For An Oldie

We are a species that's survived because we got very very good at pattern recognition.

And of course, eventually some asshole politician figured out how to manipulate us because of it.

Michael Schermer from about 9 years ago.

Sunday, June 26, 2022

Everybody's Got One


Not that I feel a need to go out of my way to shit on somebody's hopefulness, but c'mon, guys - SCOTUS has been scuttling laws aimed at regulating guns for 30 years - and I don't think we have long to wait before there's a lawsuit challenging this new assault on "shall not be infringed" and SCOTUS strikes it down.

There could be, however, a weird Good News / Bad News angle to consider.

If the law is upheld, that could give the liberals a warm and fuzzy feeling, and signal some small chance for even better gun safety laws to follow, but it could also mean that the plutocracy has decided it's time to curtail the rabble's ability to fight back.

Authoritarians love for you to go around waving your big bad substitute penis in the air when it intimidates "the left", but they can't afford to have you well-enough armed to mount an effective resistance once they have a choke hold on power, and you recognize that you've been slickered - again.

WaPo - Opinion: (pay wall)

GOP support for a gun bill offers hope for bigger reforms

Fifteen Republicans in the Senate and 14 in the House joined with congressional Democrats this week to break more than 25 years of inaction on gun safety. That these Republicans, many of whom had ratings of A or A-plus from the National Rifle Association, defied the gun lobby with their support of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act suggests they saw the political peril in doing nothing about the gun violence gripping the country. Indeed, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who voted for the bill, admitted as much when he said he hoped GOP support for the measure “will be viewed favorably by voters” as the party seeks to regain the majority next year.

The public sentiment for gun safety that has steadily built with each mass shooting, finally forcing Republicans to drop their ironclad opposition, offers hope that the legislation, signed into law by President Biden on Saturday, will be the first and not last step in bringing some rationality to the nation’s gun laws.

The 80-page bill, produced by a small group of Republican and Democratic senators in the aftermath of back-to-back mass shootings at a Buffalo grocery store and a Texas school, falls far short of the tough but common-sense measures long sought by gun-control advocates. There are no universal background checks, no ban of large-capacity magazines, no requirements for safe storage of weapons and no action — not even raising the minimum age of purchase — on assault weapons. That, though, does not detract from the significance of what was achieved.

Among the worthwhile reforms: enhanced background checks for younger gun buyers to include juvenile and mental health records; incentives for states to adopt red-flag laws that allow guns to be temporarily confiscated from people deemed dangerous by a judge; tougher penalties on illegal gun purchases; and revision of a federal law intended to keep guns out of the hands of domestic abusers to close the “boyfriend loophole.” Those measures — along with billions of new federal dollars to expand mental health programs and improve school safety — will save lives.

Credit for the hard work of fashioning a compromise that both sides could agree to goes to Sens. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and John Cornyn (R- Tex.), aided by Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.). Mr. Murphy had just been elected to the Senate in 2012 when a gunman killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in his home state and has been tireless in his pursuit of common-sense gun control despite many setbacks. Mr. Cornyn’s willingness to negotiate — and his refusal to back down even when faced with withering criticism from former president Donald Trump, Fox News and his state GOP party — is equally praiseworthy. So is his forthrightness in standing up to the NRA. “We worked with the NRA, listened to their concerns, but in the end I think they simply — they have a membership and a business model that will not allow them to support any legislation,” Mr. Cornyn said.


Passage of the bill came a day after the Supreme Court expanded gun rights by striking down a New York law limiting the carrying of guns in public. That ill-advised and dangerous ruling may have tempered any celebration over the gun bill, but it can’t squelch the public sentiment that has risen up in support of rational gun-safety laws.

Remember that last bit, and keep it in mind as we have to contemplate the probability that this is all part of the typically cynical machinations of a Republican party that knows the Supreme Court is chock full of "conservatives" who will knock down anything "Progressive" that manages to get through.


In the case of gun regulation, Cornyn can sit back and say, "Well gee whiz, I was willing to humor the dumbass Dems and give their cockamamy scheme a try, but the Supreme Court says it's unconstitutional (just like I knew they would - wink wink) - whaddaya gonna do?"

Ya heard it here first.

Thursday, March 10, 2022

Revelation

From Brian Tyler Cohen's Twitter account:

A trucker in the convoy says he’s taking a day off from driving in laps around DC because “3 young girls in a blue Hyundai” flipped him off. He says he’s now fearful: “It wasn’t just a normal middle finger that was relaxed... It messed me up.”

It's the shock of realizing that the world is not with you - that you aren't in the majority like they promised - that you've been lied to and manipulated.

ie: "I'm the bad guy? How'd that happen? I did everything they told me to..."

Saturday, October 23, 2021

COVID-19 Update





Mis-Information (and its evil progenitor, Dis-Information) are always with us.
'Twas ever thus, and ever thus 'twill be.

The only antidote is to keep hammering away at the fallacies, and pointing out the nefarious intent of it all.

A lie can make it halfway around the world
before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.

I imagine Edward Bernays would be proud of what's going on.



Five tactics used to spread vaccine misinformation in the wellness community, and why they work

When Kristina W. received her first dose of the coronavirus vaccine earlier this year, she was terrified. Until recently, she said, she believed that vaccines were so dangerous she was willing to “go into an all-out war” to protect her children from receiving any immunizations.

“I had this deep-rooted fear that they could, and possibly even would, kill my children,” said Kristina, 26, a mother of two who lives in New Mexico and spoke on the condition that her full name not be used out of concern for her safety.

Now, although she considers herself “pro-vax” and understands that vaccines are safe and necessary, that knowledge doesn’t always quell her anxiety. These lingering concerns, she believes, are a testament to the power of the anti-vaccination narratives she was exposed to in natural parenting and alternative health groups on Facebook, some of which had convinced her that routine childhood immunizations had nearly killed her eldest son.

“If you’ve never been anti-vax and back to vaccinating, you don’t quite understand the level of anxiety” that can come with resuming vaccinations, Kristina said. “You have that logical knowledge that vaccines are just fine. They’re this great thing. But emotions aren’t logical.”

Experts say the content shared in some wellness communities has powerful emotional and psychological foundations that can cause even science-minded people to question the public health consensus on the ability of vaccines to help curb the spread of the coronavirus. Some voices within the wellness space are adept at building connection, gaining trust and sowing doubt — all while appealing to widely held beliefs about healthy living.

“This is what makes some in the wellness community so dangerous,” said Stephanie Alice Baker, a sociologist at City, University of London, who is careful to add that not everyone in the wellness space is trying to cast doubt on vaccines. “It’s not that the wellness community per se is conspiratorial, or that everyone has these kinds of nefarious interests where they intend to manipulate and deceive,” she said. “It’s that once you trust leaders and influencers in this space, then when they become more conspiratorial and extreme, you are susceptible to go down that path with them because you already trust them.”

In some ways, the messaging and themes used by some vaccine-hesitant members of wellness communities reflect those that have been documented in the broader anti-vaccine movement. But there are certain approaches, experts said, that especially key in on the interests and vulnerabilities of people who are invested in wellness culture.

Recognizing these strategies is “essential in helping social media users develop resilience to harmful content and allowing them to report this type of content to platforms,” Cécile Simmons, a researcher with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, wrote in an email.

Encouraging skepticism of institutions

The online wellness community rose to prominence amid an erosion of trust in traditional authorities, such as government, health and science institutions and mainstream media, said Baker, co-author of “Lifestyle Gurus,” which explores how authority and influence are created online. This loss of faith has only been exacerbated by the pandemic, which has produced conflicting and confusing guidance from public officials.

In a “low trust society,” Baker said, “you look for other sources to trust and where to place your trust because we can’t be experts on everything. We need other authorities and influential people to guide us.” In the wellness world, those authorities might include nutritionists, physical trainers, lifestyle bloggers, spiritual coaches, naturopaths, yoga teachers and holistic health experts. Among them are online influencers with large and small followings. Sometimes, in fact, a more modest following can lead to more trust; marketers say that micro-influencers (10,000 to 50,000 followers) and nanoinfluencers (fewer than 10,000 followers) may be seen as more truthful and authentic.

Ashley Taylor, who says she is a registered nurse and holistic health coach, posts frequently about “freedom” on Instagram to more than 51,000 followers. In one colorful post that was deleted after the publication of this article, Taylor wrote, “Approval from a 3 letter agency does not override your right to autonomy and to decide what goes into your body.” While she emphasized in the post’s caption that she wasn’t trying to make decisions for her followers, she also listed multiple reasons she doesn’t “have a lot of trust in the [U.S. Food and Drug Administration].”

Taylor did not respond to requests for comment but afterward shared a public post on Instagram that said, in part, “I am not you. So I will never try to tell you what is right for you. I am here to remind you that it is your choice to make.”

Kristina, the former anti-vaccine mother, recalled seeing comments casting doubt on the motives of public health agencies in the Facebook groups she visited.

For example, she said, she became “suspicious” after reading a misleading claim about the CDC holding patents for a number of vaccines, and “that seemed to scream a financial motive.” While the CDC does license vaccine technology developed within the agency, some of which is patented, it does not sell vaccines.

Promoting distrust can be especially effective when it plays into a person’s existing doubts about traditional institutions — doubts that often stem from legitimate concerns about health and safety or poor experiences with the health care system.

Lydia Greene, a mother of three who was a self-described “anti-vaxxer” for more than a decade, vividly recalls the nurse who dismissed her concerns when she thought her first child had a reaction to vaccinations.

“The nurse basically blew me off and made me feel dumb,” said Greene, 40, who was a quality control chemist at a pharmaceutical plant before she left her job to start a family. Greene said she increasingly turned to online parenting forums for guidance, where she was exposed to anti-vaccination beliefs that convinced her to stop vaccinating her children.

“You just feel so lost,” she said, “and these are your people, and they tell you what to do when you’re not sure.”

Framing themselves as truth-seekers

In this climate of distrust, experts said, many people in the wellness community present themselves as truth-seekers at constant risk of being silenced by mainstream authorities or online moderators.

When these people’s posts are flagged online, Greene said, they often claim the platform’s moderators are just “trying to get the sheep to take the vaccine.”

Heather Shields, a “Health + fitness motivator,” according to her Instagram bio, with about 10,400 followers, has posted during the pandemic about sharing “truth.” In one photo, Shields poses with what appears to be a strip of black tape over her mouth, holding a finger up against the tape in a shushing signal. The post’s caption says, “Why are people like me being hidden, shadow-banned, fb jailed and cyber-attacked? Because WE ARE THE VOICE OF TRUTH…” and includes the hashtag “#wewillnotbesilenced.” Shields did not respond to requests for comment.


heathershields_wellness Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.
Harry Truman

Why are Doctors, scientists, journalists, mothers, and injured victims are being silenced?

Why are people like me being hidden, shadow-banned, fb jailed and cyber-attacked?

Because WE ARE THE VOICE OF TRUTH and truth doesn’t fill dirty politicians and pHARMa’s pockets.

But I will never be silenced. I will always fight for my kids. I will fight for the victims. I will even fight for those of you who still think this is about your health. I have always, and I will always fight for truth.

Experts said it’s also important to recognize potential financial motives behind the truth-seeker framing: It can help influencers promote and sell alternative therapies, such as herbal tinctures and essential oils, which undergo far less regulation than vaccines and drugs approved by the FDA.“There’s a lot of content that heads down the path of ‘You shouldn’t take this vaccine. Instead, you should buy my colloidal silver. Instead you should buy my essential oil,’” said Renee DiResta, the research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory who studies the spread of malign narratives across social networks.

Taking science out of context

The public is observing the scientific method up close and in real-time. The uncertainty inherent in the process, and the rapidly-changing public policy based on it, has eroded trust further in authorities and made it easier for members of the wellness community who are vaccine hesitant to present scientific material in a misleading way, experts said.

“The size of the following and the certainty of a voice have substituted for getting in there and understanding if this is peer reviewed or if there’s any science behind it,” said Doreen Dodgen-Magee, psychologist and author of “Deviced!: Balancing Life and Technology in a Digital World.”

“Do your own research” is a common refrain in anti-vaccination spaces, said DiResta. But, she added, it’s often said by people “sharing links to sites that are very aligned in a particular way, usually an anti-vaccine way.”

Another tactic is cherry-picking data. For example, some will point to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, known as VAERS, as evidence of widespread deaths and injuries from vaccines, while ignoring the broadly acknowledged limitation of its data. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, which co-sponsors the database with the CDC and FDA, a report alone cannot be used to determine if a vaccine caused or contributed to an adverse event. Furthermore, anyone can file a report to the database with “incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental and unverified information.”

Gigi Winters, who runs the Instagram account “informed_mothers” and uses hashtags such as “#conservativememes” and “#conservativewomen,” encouraged her 49,500 followers to “Research everything!” in a short video referencing the coronavirus vaccines on Instagram Reels that has been viewed more than 86,000 times. In the video, Winters cites a misleading statistic about the coronavirus survival rate, writing, “I’ll take my 99.9% chance and trust my immune system instead…”

That often-cited statistic, which has been circulating for more than a year, has been identified by fact-checkers as an apparent misuse of modeling data from the CDC, which noted that the parameters it was using in its scenarios “are not predictions of the expected effects of COVID-19” (emphasis in the original). This statistic also doesn’t take into account the long-term health impacts and cost of treatment many covid-19 survivors may face. Winters did not respond to requests for comment.

Appealing to natural and holistic health interests

An interest in natural remedies and holistic health can be a gateway into the vaccine-hesitant community, experts said. Kristina said her journey down the “rabbit hole” started with a desire for a nonmedicated birth. In the Facebook groups she joined, she noticed that many people “seemed to be inherently anti-vax and there was a sort of unspoken rule about not advocating for vaccinations.”

In some Instagram accounts featuring natural and holistic living content, vaccine misinformation is slipped in between general posts about well-being and designed to blend in with a profile’s overall visually pleasing aesthetics: vibrant photographs of food, flowers and landscapes as well as serene palettes and attractive fonts.

“This content is ‘prettified’ for Instagram and often couched in the fairly ambiguous language of personal choice and self-realization that is characteristic of these communities,” said Simmons, of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. “Subtle anti-vaccine messaging appears alongside pictures of sunset and yoga poses and posts about meditation and raw food, making it look seemingly innocuous.”

Vaccine-hesitant voices within wellness communities also post frequently about impure, man-made products — and put the vaccines in that category, sometimes calling them “poison.”

Yolande Norris-Clark, who goes by “bauhauswife” on Instagram, describes herself as a “Writer, birth educator, freebirth coach, iconoclast.” She shares information about natural birth practices and photos of herself and her children in scenic landscapes with her 46,500 followers, along with posts questioning vaccines and the medical establishment. In one post, Norris-Clark shared a minimalistic text graphic that read, “The very notion of injecting a foreign substance into a human being’s body to promote ‘health’ is not only absurd, but utterly perverse.” Norris-Clark did not respond to requests for comment.

Anti-vaccine messaging also tends to emphasize strengthening the immune system through natural foods and fitness, rather than relying on man-made interventions, experts said.

The common argument: “You don’t need this. Here is an alternative thing for you. If you only boost your immune system and wash your hands, then you’re not going to catch disease X,” DiResta said.

Building community

Online wellness spaces also can feel welcoming, validating and intimate, in contrast to institutions, which often deliver dry and fact-based information.

Many people in these spaces create a perception of openness by documenting daily activities such as meals, workout routines and self-care regimens. Members of groups also share personal stories that are often relatable and compelling. The perceived intimacy and authenticity of these online interactions can create what experts call parasocial relationships, or a sense of closeness to a person you don’t actually know.

“Western medicine kind of goes, ‘Here’s a fact, believe it,’” said psychologist Dodgen-Magee, whereas the wellness community “appeals to something very unique and shiny and missed for many people in daily life, which is this sense of being known and being seen and feeling felt.”

Isabel Klibanoff, a small-business owner who runs the Instagram account “junebug.co,” which has more than 19,600 followers, describes her page as “a community for beings of light.” Klibanoff has called for that community to resist “tyranny” and “forced injections.” In a now-deleted post alongside a neutral-toned graphic that read, “There is nothing wrong with you. There is everything wrong with the world,” she praised people for “not following the crowd and daring to be different!!” She added, “[You] should all be commended for your incredible bravery and strength.”

In an emailed statement, Klibanoff said, in part, “I firmly believe in each individual’s right to choose what pharmaceutical products they put into their bodies, particularly when there is no long-term safety data available on said products. I believe in informed consent for all medical procedures, and coercion is not consent.”

That sense of community helped draw moms Greene and Kristina into the anti-vaccine movement. “After a while, you have this online family where you can post a paragraph and then five minutes later you’ve got all these replies and all this advice and all this support,” Greene said. “You come to value their opinion and their thoughts and their approval even. It gets deep really quickly.”

But an online community also played a major role in Kristina’s return to vaccine acceptance. In early 2020, Kristina, who had begun to question her anti-vaccination stance, joined the evidence-based Facebook group “Vaccine Talk,” whose co-founder emphasized to The Washington Post in a recent profile that civility is critical to the group’s success.

“What we envisioned when Vaccine Talk was first created was that it could be a place where people could ask questions and get answers from people who are understanding and sympathetic, but giving them evidence-based information that they can rely on,” said Kate Bilowitz, the group’s co-founder. “The people who are active in the group are there because they really care about the group and the members that come in and ask questions are looking for guidance.”

For years, Kristina had been convinced through online natural parenting and natural health groups that vaccination was linked to her son’s severe gastrointestinal issues. But when she posted on Vaccine Talk, its members — who she felt were mostly understanding and patient — helped her find more plausible reasons for her son’s condition. They “helped me critically think about why I had these views,” Kristina said.

These days, Kristina is an active member of another online community — Back to the Vax — a support group for vaccine hesitant people and former anti-vaxxers. Greene, who co-founded the group, said she abandoned her anti-vaccination beliefs after she reexamined them during the pandemic. She is now in nursing school with the goal of using her education to fight vaccine hesitancy.

Both women acknowledge that one of the more difficult aspects of changing their stance on vaccination was coming to terms with the fact that they had been so mistaken.

“It was extremely psychologically difficult to really face what I was wrong on,” Kristina said. “When you have deep-rooted beliefs, anything that goes against that can feel like a personal attack.”

Greene now likens the fear of being wrong to a prison. “It keeps you in this box and it doesn’t allow for growth,” she said. “Just lean into it, you’ll be fine.”