By Jack Dugan
In a post-truth world in which all the news is fake and social media are a primary method of information consumption, cognitive dissonance is an unfortunate resolve for the millennial mind.
How have we arrived at such a constant of boondoggled misinformation? The White House publishes lists of terror attacks that simply never existed, media outlets such as Fox News walk along paths akin to politically charged propaganda, and your Uncle Tim is totally convinced that the refugees are coming for his freedoms. What part of the human mind places blind faith in people simply because they have come to a conclusion? Some light can be found in the manner in which these conclusions are asserted (often devoid of important little things called facts).
Lets take a look at Infowars’ Alex Jones, a talking head who has ascended to notoriety for outlandish fear mongering rooted in the hypothetical and conspiratorial, often peppered with emotional breakdowns. Most folks recognize that absurdity in his assumptions, often teetering on “flat earth society” rejections of empirical evidence, but there is a significant population that’s hooked on his political junk. Nearly 2 million people subscribe to his Youtube channel that maintains an oddly impressive output, currently sitting at 31,000 videos.
In his most recent video, published March 3, he opens his show with a statement that reads “every criminal force on the planet is basically working against Trump and the American people. It is simply staggering. A few days ago I thought of this. I remember driving to work in the car and thinking “when I get there I need to tell my writers and researches to Google (the search engine) Hillary Clinton with Putin, John McCain with Putin.” As he says this, he punctuates and accents certain words with a strained jowl, all of his “research” collected in stacks that are scattered around him, conveying some loose sense of fevered anxiety behind his conclusions.
What he is saying is simple and, to be honest, a plausible statement: Trump meeting with Putin does not translate to indisputable evidence of a Russian infiltration of the White House. Though, how he asserts this conclusion is troubling.
Despite the totally insane notion of “every criminal force on the planet” working against the American people (I can think of plenty criminal forces that are exclusively composed of American people) the statements “my writers and researchers” conveys a two-dimensional sense of expertise or validity to his statements. This is to demand your audience to appeal to an authority that does not exist. Ambivalence to truth is byproduct of such assertions.
Then, to posit these researchers whom we neither know nor should we trust, into the realm of some folks that Google things, proves the logical fallacy that opens his argument. Why should we believe a word he says when he fails to provide any expert qualification to his argument (kind of like what I’m doing here, but you can trust me)?
Our loathed and loved 45th President Trump does the same thing (sad!). To place the crux of an argument in vague and hollow expertise has become a staple in how he delivers his speeches, the same Jones-esque strained facial expressions to accent words that he believes people should dwell on. Though we could assume that the White House employs some smart folks, we shouldn’t. Don’t believe a word you read or hear until there is something real (like facts) behind it.