Truth, Authority, and The American Way
“When you make peace with authority, you become authority.”-James Douglass Morrison
“The rules were made to be broken intelligently.”-Admiral James Stephen Morrison
We have a problem with authority, and it has nothing to do with the County Sheriff finding out we turned his daughter into a glazed doughnut on her OnlyFans last weekend. We face a problem of epistemological proportion. Shortly after September 11, 2001 our ways and means to discern knowledge devolved into a reductive farce. We’ve been inhabiting a festering wound for the past twenty years; logic has been cleaved from discourse, suspension of disbelief has usurped reason, and skepticism has been officially declared an act of terrorism. We live in a world of antipode wonder; fashion is now gender, assembly is violence (unless it’s sanctioned violence, which as we all know is "mostly peaceful") and crackpipe distribution is considered a sensible public health measure. A public relations strategy forged by the War On Terror has pervaded American public discourse and as a result people don’t simply have disagreements, they occupy alternate dimensions. We must reckon with these terminal disparities of perception or risk being gaslit every time we turn our eyes and ears in an adversarial direction.
A historical process-based model for Truth Finding
As long as philosophy has existed, humans have pondered the nature of knowledge and how we attain it. Thinkers from Thales to Žižek have contributed to a discourse on truth that has spanned over a millennia. We know that a necessary requirement for knowledge is belief. However, belief alone is not sufficient for knowledge. People can believe all sorts of nutty shit and be as far from knowledge as a stripper’s knees on a coke dealer’s mattress. Let’s sperg for a moment and consider a spectrum with belief at one and knowledge at the other. In the middle, there would be a category called “justified belief".” This spectrum is process-oriented, not results-oriented; a justified belief may be proven untrue and a random unjustified belief could possibly be true. Knowledge is always true though. It’s a noble constant like the measurement of the speed of light in a vacuum. The general consensus in philosophy is that when we do arrive at the truth, we do so by perception, memory, reason, or testimony.
Please forgive me for this brief foray into philosophical dilettantism homies, but I think it’s necessary to cursorily explain this traditional concept of knowledge in order to understand its mistreatment today. I’m firmly resolved not to make this sort of thing a habit lest it compels me to lop my dick off with a scalpel and demand everyone address me as "Shirley"
How I learned to stop thinking and love the yarn: the Dark Magick NeoConquistadors
Two decades ago, Secretary of Defense Donald Henry Rumsfeld was asked to address reports that there was no evidence that Iraq was in the business of supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorist organizations. It was barely an Alchemical Season into the New Aeon, and Rumsfeld had attained superconductivity via human sacrifice. Rumfeld's rejoinder to this the verbal “citation needed” tag from some nameless milquetoast corporate drone was an incantation that cast the entire concept of knowledge in liberal democracies to the void:
“Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.”
It wasn’t evident at the time, but Rumsfeld was raising the banner for a new realm in public discourse. Before that moment, the most brazen dissembling by clever and artful leaders was met with reprisal when it conflicted with an objective reality. But through the lives sacrificed on 9/11 (for what is sacrifice but the conversion of matter to energy?) Cheney and Rumsfeld had been plotting a new reality, and Rumsfeld just spake it into existence. No longer would perception, reason, or memory encumber a ruler’s agenda. Henceforth, truth would only exist in the form of testimony by authority. Bush himself had provided an emotional framework to brook no argument to this new model of truth a couple of months earlier when he said “(e)ither you’re with us or you’re with the terrorists” during his declaration of war against terror.
One year after Rumsfeld’s incantation Secretary of State Colin Powell trotted before the United Nations Security Council. He had the affected bearing of an earnest lawyer, arguing indictment of Saddam Hussein for supervillany, establishing actus reus of developing chemical and biological weapons and mens rea to use them at any time. “My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources,” he said, “what we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.” We now know this to be bullshit. But this was a stage show and stage shows require no burden of proof. The truth is, Powell was delivering a soliloquy. The decision to invade Iraq had been made long before he jerked the curtain.
Powell’s performance was a humiliation ritual- the blossom of roots planted during the Reagan administration. Reagan’s Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger had a beef with Rumsfield and his then-underling Cheney starting back in the Nixon administration. Regan's appointment of Rumsfeld as Special Envoy compounded Weinberger's disdain. Powell served as military assistant to Cap Weinberger, and his DoD maintained close familial ties. (Alma Powell once wept outside the Taj Mahal because she wanted to go inside, but had to wait outside because the corpulent Jane Weinberger refused to walk anymore that day.) Rumfeld and Cheney made much mirth at having Powell recite their fiction before the security council.
2004 was a vindication of the New Model Reality. George W. Bush was reelected. Rumsfeld’s “Unknown Unknowns” spell, which was once ridiculed as an example of egregious doublespeak, was now being lauded for epistemological soundness. Bush was proclaimed Time Magazine’s Person of the Year for “reframing reality to match his design.” A study conducted by Steve Rendall and Tara Broughel found that 71 percent of American media outlets supported the invasion of Iraq. The media gave Bush more support than the American people did in the election, which makes sense. The Bush administration adopted the practice of embedding reporters with military units during the invasion of Iraq. Television journalists are particularly narcissistic people who are enamored with their own ability to spam carbon. If you allow them to do that while feeling heroic, you’ve turned the entire press pool into Pavlov’s kennel.
Not every camper was happy towards then end of Bush’s second term though. More and more voices began to speak out against the Iraq invasion (long after it mattered). A cottage industry of ridiculing Bush had established itself on the left side of American media, but it was completely feckless. Colin Powell resented lending his gravitas to Cheney and Rumsfeld’s stage play and was so sore about it in 2008 he took the shocking and unprecedented step of crossing the partisan isle to endorse…….Cheney’s cousin Barry for President.
My neighbor Sotoro
If Bush gets credit for framing reality to fit his design, Barack Obama should receive a triumph as a double-frame narrator. The Mulattoreich embodied the perfection of New Model Truth. He was both product and producer of testimonial authority. Obama successfully integrated digital platforms as propaganda delivery systems without endangering the thrall of legacy media. For a brief shining moment, black churchgoers and effete liberal atheists took solace in a man who they thought represented them or their loftiest ideals. The anti-Bush liberals who voted for him may have gotten too high on that sweet sweet virtue signaling to realize that the difference between Obama and Bush in regard to the middle east is that the former was more subtle and efficient. Obama conducted more assassinations via drone strike in one year than Bush did for his entire presidency. The black church crowd was too busy marveling at the fact Obama probably didn’t smell like a wet dog to notice that his embrace of all things LGBTQ++z did not gee and haw with their values.
Even though Bush and company disregarded the truth to suit their purpose, they could always point to an external event as the prime mover of their doctrine (and Jesus did they ever). Obama’s bullshit sprang from his very being. Here was a man who could rend hearts by squeezing out a crocodile tear during a speech about gun control after a school shooting, then go back to the office and drone some brown kids a world away into red vapor.
The narrative class lauded Obama as a great humanitarian for enacting an impractical and short-lived healthcare act, but somehow forgot that he also priced out many people who were dependent on medicine by allowing hedge funds to play pharmaceuticals like an equity market. He hardly faced Iran Contra tier scrutiny when the ATF got caught providing arms to Mexican cartels on his watch. But the most insane pass the media gave him involved his hatchet man, Attorney General Eric Holder publishing a white paper stating that the government could assassinate US citizens any place any time.
If you remove the messianic boogie and mute the post-racial drum circle, Obama was just an optimized version of Bush. The reason that people don’t consider him in that light is because news media functioned as an indefatigable Praetorian guard to his image. Any happenings that seemed to controvert what they’d graven was discarded as was any person who dared challenged their avatar. To paraphrase Bush, you’re either with us or against us.
Trump: going to war with people who buy ink by the gallon
The second Donald J. Trump was elected President his relationship with the press was doomed. It wasn’t because of how popular he was or who he was popular with, it was because every second of his term reminded them of an entire world beyond their control. This wasn’t because of deficient imagination; the press spent over a decade and a half in a world of fiction. The problem was it was a world of top- down artifice; they were blind to any whiff of populism that didn’t come with a press kit and receipt from Soros or the Koch Brothers. They imagined a Bush v. Clinton election from force of habit. Once Trump secured the republican nomination, they drafted monologues to hail the first female president in United States history. When the results from the general election came they didn't take it well.
For Bush and Obama’s terms, the press operated under a soft version of Goebbels’ principles of propaganda. An outline to official narrative was distributed from a central source to an auxiliary media apparatus whose job was to color between the lines and occasionally provide some nominal dissent as a pretense to objectivity. But the press despised Trump at a quantum level. There was no chance they would waste their narrative talents on someone who made them look so foolish. Then a couple of months after his inaugural, Trump granted them a boon. He said the quiet part out loud by tweeting that the New York Times, CNN, and NBC News were the enemy of the people. The press now had a causus belli. He wasn’t with them, he was against them. For the next four years the Praetorians would do everything in their power to hand Trump the fate of Pertinax then auction the purple to an aspirant most willing to do business with them.
At first glance, Trump’s decision seemed reasonable. Obama had shown just how effective the internet could be as a tool for direct communication between a President and the people, and Trump was even better at it than Obama was. If engagement is the number one metric for social media success, it’s unlikely there will ever be a president as successful as Donald J. Trump. He was a master at compelling engagement through Twitter. Even the legacy media outlets with whom he’d declared enmity were forced to cover his tweets in their reporting. But the fact they did was the first subtle portent to Trump’s demise. When he gave his first post-election rally in December coverage was minimal: there was a blurb in the New York Times calling it a rehash of the rallies he’d had during the campaign. Yet every media outlet, even the named Enemies of the People all ran stories about Trump’s provocative edicts on twitter. Why? Same speaker, same message. But the key difference was the messenger, Twitter. New head, same Hydra.
Legacy media attacked Trump’s authority like Priests of Amun spewing bile at Akhenaten. They worked to scratch his deeds from history before they’d ever been established. They questioned his sanity, temperament, and mental stability as well has his policy. They became so unhinged with spite towards Trump they accused him of throwing immigrant children in cages, completely forgetting that Obama authored the policy. Trump only paid them enough mind to stoke their resentment and then he went on about his business, confident in his ability to deliver the people his unrefracted message through rallies and social media.
In August 2018, an event occurred that would seem unrelated to Trump, but would effect him directly three years later. Facebook, Apple, YouTube, and Spotify all removed any and all pages, podcasts, and videos that belonged to Alex Jones from their platforms. Facebook said Jones was removed for “glorifying violence” and “using dehumanizing language to describe people who are transgender, Muslims and immigrants.” Apple's explanation was “hate speech.” Spotify claimed Jones was removed because he “expressly and principally promotes, advocates, or incites hatred or violence against a group or individual based on characteristics.” YouTube's excuse was a form response stating that the company terminates accounts that violate their Terms of Service and Community Guidelines. None of the platforms explained how they all arrived at the same conclusion at approximately the same time though.
Jones’ banishment was novel. He wasn’t a fringe figure. His YouTube channel had 17 million views the month he was removed. He drew millions of listeners on Apple and Spotify. However, his popularity was no roadblock to his removal from every platform he utilized. This was a less subtle sign of things to come.
As the war of words between Trump and news media waged on, the Narrative Class realized they needed a new strategy to augment their campaign against their adversary. They made “fact-checking” a centerpiece of any Trump-related news coverage. (The practice was originally conceived by Washington Post reporters and called “Truth Squaddin’”, WaPo came up with the practice to challenge another charismatic populist with a talent for extemporaneous speech, Ronald Reagan.) The drawback of constant fact checking is that it reaches the point where the returns diminish to the point of inefficacy. Plus the press were losing their ability to even nod to the facade of objective journalism. And then they received a miracle….
Are you Washed in the Blood, for Science?
On January 28, 2020 a group of doctors and scientists made remarks during a press briefing. The group was part of the President’s Novel Coronavirus Task Force, assembled deal with a new virulent strain of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome that had first appeared in Wuhan China. Dr. Anthony Stephen Fauci was one of those speakers. Wearing a pinstripe suit during his remarks, Fauci projected the confidence of a seasoned thespian. He informed viewers that his National Institute of Health was already at work in partnership with a company called Moderna to develop a vaccine for this new coronavirus. Even though there were only 5 confirmed cases of the virus in the U.S. at the time, Fauci addressed the looming threat with coolness, confidence, prescience (and Science!).
As Fauci dipped a toe into the limelight the 2020 Iowa Democratic Presidential Caucuses were happening. Due to apparent issues with a computer application manufactured by a liberal software company called Shadow Inc. results of the caucuses were delayed. As a result both Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders and mayor Pete Buttigeg (D, Sodom) declared victory. After a three-day recanvass, the Iowa Democratic Party declared Buttigeg a winner in delegate count, although Sanders won more individual votes. Both CNN and the New York Times helpfully applied their analytic acumen clarify the results and smooth over issues with the caucus. The NYT was particularly objective in their work, noting that demographic info would “eventually be adjusted to reflect vote count.” Two of the very same media outlets Trump declared “enemy of the people” were now exercising their authority over the electoral process.
As 2020 progressed, Fauci’s star rose. He was omnipresent, dispensing the latest official guidance about COVID-19 to any and all media outlet with a hint of a smile in an avuncular tone. Fauci’s boss, Trump, lamented that the Food and Drug Administration was impeding his goal of making a vaccine for the virus available before the general election. It was announced that Joe Biden would be his party’s nominee for President at an abbreviated Democratic National Convention. (Biden received over 19 million votes out of the 36,917,179 votes cast in the primary).
On March 2020, the 116th Congress introduced the Natural Disaster Emergency Ballot Act of 2020 which expanded the use of absentee mail-in voting during the COVID pandemic. Trump complained about the integrity of provisions of the Ballot Act, and was summarily refuted by CNN. Biden made sporadic appearances before sparse gatherings on the campaign trail, but the majority of his campaign was comprised of video dispatches from his basement. On August 17, at a rally in Oshkosh Wisconsin, Trump stated “The only way we're going to lose this election is if the election is rigged.”
Facebook announced that October that it would no longer run advertisements discouraging people to get vaccinated against COVID 19. YouTube announced it would remove any videos from its platform that contradicted CDC statements. Fauci was now acting as supreme and lone epistemic authority on COVID. The media happily granted him as much airtime as necessary to amply his voice. YAY ALLIES!
The 2020 general election, conducted under the rules of the Ballot Act awarded the presidency to Joseph Robinette Biden. Biden quadrupled the amount of votes he received in the primary, winning over 81 million votes to become the 46th President of the United States. The Priests of Testimony rejoiced. Akhnaten bore witness to his erasure, during his reign.
The Merry Go Round Breaks Down
I doubt there’s a drug in existence that could give anything close to the feeling that the Narrative Class felt when Biden won the election. They could go back to authoring a testimonial reality without having to spend so much time “fact checking.” It allowed them a free hand on January 6 2021 to color a large group of mostly middle-aged to elderly Trumpers who shuffled between the velvet ropes of the National Statuary Hall as very legitimate, very scary threats to democracy itself. (Imagine the narrative implosion that would have occurred if the statue of Jefferson Davis were defaced.) With another artful stroke they were able to cast a black capital police officer with a history of firearm negligence as a hero for shooting an unarmed woman in the neck. Trump, who maintained that the election was stolen for some reason, was accused of instigating a movement to overturn the election results. On January 8, the President was banned from social media. Vae victis!
2021 was a halcyon year for New Narrative Truth. The media now were at the height of their power. They now had an Emperor in Biden who depended on their largess to appear as a functioning cognitive being and a steady Pontifex Maximus in Fauci whose Papal Bulls on science they amplified to the high heavens. But by investing in Fauci as the spring of testimonial authority they sacrificed their self-mythicized duty of speaking “truth to power.” This was a terminal error.
If a pleb questions unimpeachable authority, it’s no sweat to simply remove their ability to participate in public discourse. Turns out you can do the same to a sitting President. But when someone granted Supreme Testimonial Authority starts contradicting himself at a breakneck clip while tarnishing his own image, it’s a huge problem.
Contradiction in conventional religion isn’t a camelbreaker, Judaism and Christianity seem to function just fine with two differing accounts of creation in the book of Genesis. The book of Job has inspired many brilliant minds to spend their lives meditating on the nature of evil in a world created by a just God. But that’s the rub. There’s only really one mind swimming in the press pool, and it’s not brilliant by a damn sight. Also, there’s not enough time in a year to plausibly explain away the mass of inconsistency spewed forth from the Health Pope. (Well actually it could be explained pretty quickly, but the press will never admit to lying).
The waters have become murky; mask guidance, vaccine efficacy numbers, and statements about the origin of the virus have shown the consistency of mercury over the past year. Let's not pretend that the Narrative Class has the nuance of thought to square the issue of Fauci’s NIH funding Enhanced Potential Pandemic Pathogens (a phrase derived from the archaic term “gain-of-function research”) with the image of an all-knowing, all-benevolent Fauci. There’s also the issue with the good Dr.’s troublesome 10 million dollar investment portfolio.
With COVID narrative apologetics becoming untenable, the media turned its Sauron-like eye towards new crisis. The Freedom Convoy in Canada arrived just in time for them to remix last year’s hit about Capital insurrection. Even better, the State Department has decided to rehash the Cold War. But in the midst of all the chaos, we witnessed a black swan.
In the middle of a testimonial claim of Russian subterfuge in Ukraine, State Department Spokesman Net Price was asked to provide evidence by Associated Press reporter Matt Lee. A random act of journalism! Price then accused Lee of taking aid and comfort in Russian propaganda and Lee retorted by accusing Price of entering Alex Jones territory. Heel turn!
Friends, we just witnessed a a fracture in narrative unity. Only time will tell whether it's hairline or compound, but there is a verifiable instance of heresy in the church of testimonial authority. Goebbels wept.
Where do we go from here?
Thomas Hobbes once wrote ipsa scientia potestas est, and permutations of that quote ring out to this day. But Hobbes was writing about the limited scope of scientific power; only a few people acknowledge it, and even those few don't acknowledge the totality of it.
The shift to a hypernarrative is testament to the fact that if you want to accomplish something and that something requires support from at least one large group, it's much better to dangle the carrot of emotional impetus than require self-flagellation with the stick of reason. The weakness of such a strategy is that when you structure an entire society with a 9/11 hotshot, emotional fatigue is inevitable.
Also the reality-as-fiction model doubles its own opposition. Not only does empirical evidence counter New Model Reality, any bullshit counter-narrative that appears is just as plausible as the mainstream yarn. The only antidote to this is for those in power to fabricate new emotional spurs to enact an agenda. But people can only fear so much, the returns diminish. Whereas Bush and company were able to execute the totality of their design through fear of terrorism, the Biden cabal has so far invoked threats of massive death by plague AND World War III yet still couldn't pass a signature spending bill. Justin “Sunny Ways” Trudeau has resorted to calling a butch lesbian a Nazi sympathizer in order to avoid answering questions about his unprecedented use of martial law. The narrative is crumbling so hard that even Google briefly glitched out from having to carry so much water:
Despite the fact that I'm convinced that the supreme narrative authorities in the West today are bad-faith actors devoid of any capacity to even comprehend our interests, I believe they constantly bear watching. We don’t need to make the mistake of discounting every message that comes from them either. A broken analog watch is right twice a day and sometimes people just can’t help but tell you who they really are. I try my best to take a “distrust and verify” stance with anything I see out of our state media apparatus.
As important as staying informed is, it's even more important to spend more time in the real world, talking with your friends and neighbors and forming strategic alliances with as many people as you possibly can. They will come in handy some day. There is a power to knowledge, but it’s not supreme power, and history values actions over words. The Illiad isn't a story about how the Patriarchy committed themselves to Hades because they ignored Cassandra, it's about the wrath of Achilles. Imagine applying such wrath to creating a better world for our kin and future generations. Actions to that end will create a world much closer to an ideal epistemological truth than words ever could, but you already know this.