Glenn Beck, YouTube, & Matt Taibbi: CONSPIRACY?!?!
With the fire in Notre-Dame still burning, Glenn Beck started putting together the pieces of a non-existent puzzle, suggesting that “if this [fire] was started by Islamists, I don't think you'll find out about it.”
To be fair, Beck was talking on a live radio show about a still-unfolding news event, and later conceded that it indeed seemed to be the case that the fire was not a terror attack, but an accident. Still, the “if” in his hypothetical is doing a lot more work than perhaps it seems. He’s not just setting up a conditional about the possibility that the fire was set by zealots, innocuously floating a plausible, if utterly evidence-free, theory of the case. He’s saying it doesn’t matter what the fact of the situation really is, because whatever it is, THEY will tell the public it was an accident. The crucial bit actually remains true to Beck, and to some significant part of his audience, even if the conditional is false. The “if” allows Beck to traffic in unfalsifiable bullshit that doesn’t require any real-world grounding to do damage—damage that he will deny all responsibility for by claiming that he couched the whole thing in an “if.” Like this, which he tweeted the next day:
You see, when Glenn was spit-balling about the authorities covering up an Islamic terror event, that was only “political” in the broadest possible sense—he was talking about the larger political climate in France, not politicizing the burning of Notre-Dame, which was clearly not Islamic terror. (Unless it was, and of course we’ll never really know for sure.) He wasn’t saying, he was just saying “if.” What, are you stupid?
What is the damage done, then? Surely a little harmless intellectual speculation—a little just asking questions, a little critical thinking—never hurt anybody. There are two obvious possibilities here. First, there is the chance that simply floating the evidence-free idea that this was an Islamic terror attack could make life more unpleasant for Muslims everywhere, who bear no responsibility here at all. Some people, likely those already predisposed toward bigotry against Muslims, could have those feelings reinforced, and perhaps act on them in antisocial ways. While I recognize this as both likely and harmful, it doesn’t strike me as the deepest of Beck’s sins in this instance. (More on why in a bit.)
The second and more pernicious avenue for harm is, admittedly, a bit more abstract than the first, and goes to the unfalsifiability of Beck’s hypothetical. He presented as fact a theory for which no evidence can be presented to prove it right or wrong. No matter what the authorities end up saying about the fire, no matter the actual truth of the event, everyone who believes as Beck does—that the French government would do everything in its power to hide the truth—will continue to so believe. Even if Macron walked out and announced that an investigation had proven that it was in fact an Islamic terror attack, they would conclude that his hand had been forced in some way, that he simply had no other choice, that the truth was too widespread to stay hidden, anyway. What they believe is that the government will do what it can to hide the truth from the people, because the people cannot handle the truth.
This goes directly to the legitimacy of every public institution on the planet—or, rather, the unfalsifiable certainty that so many live with that those institutions are absolutely illegitimate. When Beck was coming publicly unhinged on Fox News a few years ago, at least it was obvious that he was a total kook. His "turn toward decency” (bit optimistic!) and the fact that he seems less completely fucking crazy now that those goalposts have been forever moved only makes his matter-of-fact dismissal of the possibility that government would tell the “truth” about this event all the more dangerous. Glenn Beck is nowhere close to alone in his reflexive belief that the government is wholly illegitimate, and that’s a problem.
Glenn Beck wasn’t the only person to speculatively tie the fire at Notre-Dame to the Islamic terror boogeyman without proof. Some French media-type went on Shepard Smith’s Fox News show and claimed that this was a “French 9/11,” and that “the story of political correctness” will insist that it was some sort of an accident, when it was clearly the work of Muslim terrorists. (Smith basically hung up on the guy, to his credit.) InfoWars posted half a dozen stories much to the same effect. And then it turns out YouTube’s algorithms went and popped an information panel into live streams of the event, helpfully explaining 9/11 to viewers as they watched Notre-Dame burn.
I understand YouTube’s algorithmic mistake, here. Burning landmark of massive cultural significance? Ooh, ooh! I know, I know! Remember 9/11? I ‘member!
The irony here is that those information panels were specifically designed to combat misinformation, but may have led some viewers to erroneously assume that Notre-Dame was burning as the result of a terrorist attack. As above, the possible harm done to innocent Muslims as a result of bigots behaving as bigots is real enough to be of concern, but it again strikes me as a second-order problem.
I thought of 9/11 as I watched Notre-Dame burning, and it wasn’t because I assumed it was a terror attack. (In fact, my first dumb thought was that they hadn’t properly cleaned up after Palm Sunday, and the cathedral was just extra full of kindling, and maybe a stray candle set the whole thing ablaze.) I thought of 9/11 as Notre-Dame burned because it was as unnaturally powerful an image—an iconic cultural landmark being destroyed—as the destruction of the Twin Towers, and like nothing I can remember in the interim. Drawing that connection sparked no hatred of Muslims in me—I, like YouTube, just looked at what was happening and remembered.
What I’m getting at here is that there’s no controlling for how bigots are gonna bigot. While I wish Glenn Beck wouldn’t raise the specter of Islamic terrorism without evidence, I do not hold him accountable for the (potential, in this case) actions of the bigots in his audience. Whatever else it was, it certainly wasn’t a direct call to violence or an incitement to hate. Nor do I hold YouTube accountable for the bigots in their audience, who may have seen the 9/11 information panel as Notre-Dame burned and had their anti-Muslim views “mistakenly” stoked. To that point, what if it had clearly been a terror attack, and thousands of people had died, and the parallels to 9/11 were even more explicit—would YouTube still be pilloried for popping up 9/11 information panels? In such a case the truth itself could have triggered the latent anti-Muslim bigotry in the audience. The problem is the bigotry, not the fact that some input—insidious or innocuous on its face—triggered the bigot.
Of course, Beck is more responsible for the terrible things his audience thinks than perhaps he would want to admit, in this case. He is, after all, implying that Europe is such a powder-keg right now, thanks largely (according to him) to an influx of Muslims, that the actions of a couple arsonists in Paris could ignite the whole continent. But his first order sin, here, is revealing the unfalsifiability of his worldview, and reinforcing one in his audience. The bigotry very much matters, but I think it has its roots in looser, higher soil.
This will seem like a crazy stretch, but there’s a way in which this Matt Taibbi article traffics in the same sort of conspiratorial thinking that Beck does. This is ultimately a fairly optimistic piece, ending as it does like this:
The anger toward the political establishment that drives support for such politicians began to be visible over a decade ago, long before Sanders or Gabbard were factors in any kind in national politics.
Those voters aren’t selfish, or hypocrites, or Kremlin favorites, and they’re not going anywhere. What a lot of DC-based reporters and analysts don’t grasp is that if you remove Bernie Sanders from the scene, there will still be millions of people out there mad about income inequality. Remove Gabbard, and discontent about the human and financial costs of our military commitments will still be rampant. Removing Warren won’t cancel out anger about Wall Street corruption.
Covering personalities instead of political movements only delays things for a while. Sooner or later, the conservatism of tomorrow arrives. You can only delay the inevitable for so long.
Taibbi is saying that eventually, all the “radical” ideas held by a healthy majority of the people and espoused by “outsider” candidates in this era eventually get folded into the baseline “conservative” expectations of the next one.
While I don’t deny the basic facts laid out by Taibbi—Kucinich and Sanders and Gabbard and Warren have certainly all suffered the “crazy uncle/aunt” treatment at the hands of the press—I do think he is too willing to ascribe overarching conspiratorial motivation where mere media and political expediency and inertia will suffice. Throughout the piece, Taibbi hints at an unfalsifiable view that “they” have a plan in place, a “design” to keep dangerous [re: good and popular] ideas at bay. He doesn’t come right out and say it, like Beck does, but it’s there.
Taibbi says that Bernie’s rotten treatment by the press and the political establishment “was all part of the age-old technique of focusing on the person instead of the ideas or the movement behind them.” But of course, all politics is focused on the asshole talking, rather than the ideas or movement behind them. It’s not just the outsider Crazy Bernies and “elfin peace candidates” like Kucinich who come to matter more than their ideas, at least in how they’re presented to the public—it’s just what the media does to every single candidate, ever, establishment or otherwise. There’s no design working to marginalize radical ideas—change agents and establishmentarians are equally subject to the unfortunate realities of a personality-driven politics. The result may well be a cultural muting of popular “dangerous ideas” until they are absorbed as expectation a generation later, but that doesn’t mean anybody was pulling the strings. If Taibbi’s hints of some nefarious plot are actually just a metaphorical way of talking about how systems or institutions tend to reject outsiders, he should explicitly say so. Otherwise, he runs the danger of coming across like the kook at the chalkboard, claiming malicious puppeteering where mere systemic cultural inertia can be more plausibly blamed.
This post was edited for clarity: 8:30 am 18 April 2019.
