theamericanconservative | The most effective kind of propaganda is by omission. Walter Duranty
didn’t cook up accounts from smiling Ukrainian farmers, he simply said
there was no evidence for a famine, much like the media tells us today
that there is no evidence antifa has a role in the current
protest-adjacent violence. It is much harder to do this today than it
was back then—there are photographs and video that show they have
been—which is the proximate cause for greater media concern about
conspiracy theories and disinformation.
For all the
hyperventilating over the admittedly creepy 2008 article about
“cognitive infiltration,” by Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule, it was a
serious attempt to deal with the problem of an informational center
being lost in American public life, at a time when the problem was not
nearly as bad as it is today. It proposed a number of strategies to
reduce the credibility of conspiracy theorists, including seeding them
with false information. Whether such strategies have been employed,
perhaps with QAnon, which has a remarkable ability to absorb all other
conspiracy theories that came before it, is up to the reader’s
speculation.
So it is today with George Floyd as well. It seems like there are
perfectly reasonable questions to be asked about the acquaintance
between him and Derek Chauvin, and the fact that the rather shady bar
they both worked at conveniently burned down. But by now most of the
media is now highly invested in not seeing anything other than a
statistic, another incident in a long history of police brutality, and
the search for facts has been replaced by narratives. This is a shame,
because it is perfectly possible to think that police have a history of
poor treatment toward black people and there might be corruption involved in the George Floyd case, which is something Ben Crump, the lawyer for Floyd’s family, seems to suggest in his interview on Face the Nation this weekend.
