Matt Taibbi: Moral Panics Erase Memories

In "Orwell Was Right: From free speech to "spheres of influence" to our passion for endless war, we've become the doublethinkers 1984 predicted," Matt Taibbi points out how our hair-trigger rage makes us fickle. We are consumed with one thing after the other and we no longer have time to consider nuances or our own contradictions.I have read Taibbi's brilliant analysis three times. I can't stop worrying. Not only about the war, but about the willingness of Americans to enthusiastically embrace double-standards. And then, when they no longer work, we ignore them and embrace new double-standards.

Moral panics erase memories. It’s their primary function. 9/11 wiped the national hard drive of everything from the third degree to My Lai to Operations Phoenix and Condor to the Church Committee to the School of the Americas to countless other shameful episodes, and the lessons learned from them. The Trump-Russia scandal blotted out Snowden, made the spooks the good guys again. 2016 rehabilitated neoconservatives, now reinvented as never-Trumpers, cleaning away the shame of Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan, etc.

The “misinformation” panic wiped out the WMD fiasco, restoring honor to credentialed press. The DNC leak erased “Collateral Murder.” After George Floyd we hated cops, after January 6th we loved them. Ukraine now is openly being sold as a blue-pill cure for everything that went wrong during the War on Terror, including the recent defeat in Afghanistan. “Realism” is in disgrace, and “leadership,” “regime change,” and the “universal appeal of freedom” are back, only this time their primary backers are the upper-class cosmopolitan Democrats who marched against the simplistic “freedom against evil” plot neoconservatives tried to sell them twenty years ago.

We’re at the end of a twenty-year cycle that has taken what was once the oppositional-skeptic portion of the American population and seen them rallied behind the people they once hated the most. This has been accomplished by keeping us in a rage that always escalates and is never watered down by contradictions, thanks to mastery of “reality control” via “an unending series of victories over your own memory.”

The relentless parade of panics listed above (just a small sample; we’ve had dozens just in the last few years) makes those victories easy, and every time we switch targets, from Russians to neo-Nazis to cops to transphobes to insurrectionists to the unvaccinated to truckers and back to Russians again, the Church of Forgetting picks up new converts.

I know plenty of people, many of them friends and many of them quite well educated, who now seem to be determining their heartfelt opinions by checking to see what way the wind blows around their social network. It has become extremely disappointing over the past couple of years. It's like their self-critical modules have somehow been flipped to the off position en masse.  For the most part, these are very smart people who have lost their ability to be curious and to make sense of the world around them on their own terms. It's like they've all been dusted with intellectual-coward dust. They no longer have time time or interest to listen to different thinking others. They listen to their own news sources, because other news sources are evil.

They have become hyper-vigilant to identity and difference. They write others off for the tiniest differences of opinion. Nothing less than moral purity will work if you want to be their friend in public. In private, it's somewhat different. In private you'll sometimes hear a different tune, a more measured perspective. I grew up Catholic. It reminds me of Catholics who chant in public that dead people can be alive again and that a virgin can have a baby. In private, they don't bring this stuff up because the chants served their purpose in public as cheap signaling so that they could bask in the social warmth of their group, not as meaningful information.

Productive political conversations are harder to find these days. I'm increasingly hearing the crowd-pleasing emotion-laden bluster leak into private conversations too.  I'm hearing this from people who had been staunch pacifists all their life, people who despised George W. Bush for the deaths he caused with his discretionary and deceitful war. From these same lifelong peace-niks, I am hearing calls to directly confront the Russian military. These are people who were terrified that when Trump did his bravado schtick regarding North Korea, a country that might have had a nuclear bomb or two and might have had a missile or two.  A couple years later, no problem! Ukraine is somehow worth it, even though we are cornering a man who they admit is a megalomanic nihilistic, arrogant hothead with thousands of nuclear bombs and thousands of missiles. Somehow, there is no need to do a cost-benefit analysis regarding Ukraine. And their getting lots of this aggressive talk from news media that leans to the political Left, media that hosts an unending stream of military generals and cheerleaders for the surveillance apparatus. Go figure.

Taibbi's article makes many excellent points. I encourage readers to sit down in a quiet place and to take it in line by line. One of Taibbi's points is that (for complex reasons I don't claim to fully understand) people are becoming much more willing to live only in the present. They are much more willing to seek out the outrage de jure.  "News" media is happy to feed them the newest outrage-of-the-day in order to sell advertisements. I suspect that the willingness to glue one's self to the outrage machine is exacerbated by increasing amounts of mortality salience in the air (Terror Management Theory), which induces people to "circle the wagons," further enabled by the polarizing influences of social media and our bifurcated "news media." We can't ignore COVID, COVID Denialism and COVID hysteria as other contributors to the current climate of mortality salience.

In times of mortality salience, people are looking for a "rock," something upon which they can rely. They are increasingly looking to acceptance by a group or a "group identity" rather than embracing consistent principles (e.g. free speech, the rule of law and Enlightenment principles). Contentment to live in the present is what animals such as dogs excel at. They have no language, thus no need to critique their former positions with their current positions.  Their world is their bowl of food and a someone to pet them on the head. For those who are willing to think fast, refusing to slow down to activate slower analytical thought, what is in front of you at this particular moment is always the only thing.  As Daniel Kahneman described, What You See Is All There Is (WYSIATI).  In recent times, I'm seeing increasing numbers of people who  are not willing to go back to check the hard work of slower, methodical and self-critical thinking. They see slower thinking as an impediment to their preference: impulsive action. Perhaps they have been trained for too many years of watching TV actions shows where heroes tend to be reactive (whereas villians seem to willing to sit down and plan out their diabolical plans).

It's easy to find your tribe these days. For most people it is left versus right wing politics, A versus B.  For increasing numbers of people (many that I personally know), their go-to reaction to danger is increasingly to seek the fast and easy safety of joining a group and parroting its talking points, despite the disastrous track record of this strategy.  For them, the alternative strategy of engaging in heterodox free speech, inviting dissent, seeking out nuances and doing cost-benefit analyses has become heretical. It takes too damned long, despite its excellent track. In fact, for many people, engaging in the free speech that they ostensibly celebrate on the Fourth of July has become treasonous. 

Back to Orwell's double-think. I struggled with this term until I translated it to double standards. There are two types of double-standards: A) my current actions versus my opponent's actions and B) my actions versus my own actions in the past.  A key point by Orwell is that people in a state of crisis become oblivious to their own double-standards. We don't have time for the exquisite thought tools, including skepticism math and the need for evidence, that we learned during the Enlightenment!  Many of the same people who clearly saw the their government lied to them about "weapons of mass destruction" and the "Gulf of Tonkin" incident have become some of the most fervent "believe the government" advocates. This, is despite decades of government lying about wars and decades of media outlets willingly amplifying the drumbeats of war.  They know that they should slow down and be less gullible, but there is not time for that because fear is in the air and you and people who disagree with you are miniature versions of Hitler who you being instructed to hate!  See this podcast where Taibbi discusses his book, Hate, Inc. with Joe Rogan.  All of this makes me wonder . . . are we really changing or is this the way we have always been? I suspect that social media is changing us, causing us to engage in more catastrophic thinking and all of the other things that cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is designed to prevent. Whatever the cause, increasing numbers of us seem to be wearing out cognitive dysfunctions as a fashion style, our way of showing each other that we care, even though we don't care enough to get or facts right. That pit in my stomach is trying to tell me that I have already seen (or read about) America's best moments. It appears that all of them are in the rear-view mirror now.  I hope I'm wrong, but it's getting harder and harder to convince me.

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Matt Taibbi: The Perils of Ukraine Whataboutism and the Wisdom of George Orwell

An excerpt from Matt Taibbi new article: "Orwell Was Right: From free speech to "spheres of influence" to our passion for endless war, we've become the doublethinkers 1984 predicted":

One would hope there would be at least a few Americans left who’d hear about Russia barring the BBC and Voice of America and at least recognize the sameness of the issue involved with banning RT and Sputnik. Or, seeing how pathetic and manipulative it is for Russians to prevent reporting on war casualties, we’d recall the folly of the ban we had for nearly twenty years on photographs of military coffins, or the continuing pressure on embeds to avoid publishing images of American deaths from our own war zones. We should be able to read that Twitter and Facebook are cracking down on the “fake accounts” spreading “misinformation” that “Ukraine isn’t doing well” and notice that Russia’s measures against “fake news” and “disinformation” about its own military failures — though far more draconian and carrying much more severe penalties — are rooted in the same concept.

We don’t, however, because we long ago reached the doublethink phase predicted by Orwell, where most of the population is conscious of double standards but ignores them effortlessly. A healthy person should be able to be horrified by what’s happening in Russia and also see a warning about the degradation that ensues from using “pre-emptive” force, or from trying to control discontent by erasing expressions of it. But years of relentless propaganda have trained Americans to doublethink their way out of such insights. Cornel West just laid all of this out in an interview with the New Yorker:

Everybody knows if Russia had troops in Mexico or Canada there would be invasions tomorrow. [Biden] sends the Secretary of State, telling Russia, “You have no right to have a sphere of influence,” after the Monroe Doctrine, after the overthrowing of democratic regimes in Latin America for the last hundred-and-some years. Come on, America, do you think people are stupid? What kind of hypocrisy can anybody stand?

That doesn’t mean that Putin is not still a gangster—of course he is. But so were the folk promoting the Monroe Doctrine that had the U.S. sphere of influence for decade after decade after decade after decade, and anybody critical of you, you would demonize. Yet here are you, right at the door of Russia, and can’t see yourself in the mirror. That’s spiritual decay right there, brother, it really is.

We’ve been trained to rage against this thinking. We even have our own borrowed Newspeak word for the offense: Whataboutism. The offender supposedly does a bait-and-switch, distracting with charges of hypocrisy without refuting the actual argument. But a Soviet giving a professionally two-faced answer to questions about Gulags by saying, “And you lynch blacks” isn’t the same as the much more serious thing West is talking about. Lying to others is shameful, but lying to ourselves and not even realizing it, that’s hardcore spiritual decay. We’re being driven faster toward the cliff-edge of this moral insanity with each new act of mass forgetting.

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Ukraine: Forbidden Discussions

I'm despondent that the mainstream news outlets are so intensely jingoistic, so focused on the logistics of war, so unwilling to look into the mirror. This is not surprising given the vast numbers of retired military and spy state talking heads who now work for the left leaning MSM. It's also unsurprising given that this is how war propaganda always works, illustrated brilliantly by "War Made Easy."

Here are a three snippets of conversation that I with the news media would take much more seriously:

First, this is from Freddie DeBoer's Substack:

[R]ight now, [the United States is] investing hideous amounts of treasure to maintain an order that we can’t afford and that no one really believes we can maintain. Perhaps the Ukrainians will beat back the Russians and they’ll be welcomed into NATO and we can all cheer that the good guys won. But hegemony does not last forever, and sooner or later you’re going to have to ask more adult, more useful questions than, “who’s the goodie, and who’s the baddie?” Otherwise the superpower eventually goes down the hard way.

I find myself considering this quote from a spokeswoman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

When the U.S. drove five waves of NATO expansion eastward all the way to Russia’s doorstep and deployed advanced offensive strategic weapons in breach of its assurances to Russia, did it ever think about the consequences of pushing a big country to the wall?

It doesn’t take sympathy for Putin to see that this is a very good question.

Second, Tulsi Gabbard tweeted this:

Third, Matt Taibbi reminds us that history matters:

I would like to point out that we already tried regime change in Russia. I remember, because I was there. And, thanks to a lot of lurid history that’s being scrubbed now with furious intensity, it ended with Vladimir Putin in power. Not as an accident, or as the face of a populist revolt against Western influence — that came later — but precisely because we made a long series of intentional decisions to help put him there.

Once, Putin’s KGB past, far from being seen as a negative, was viewed with relief by the American diplomatic community, which had been exhausted by the organizational incompetence of our vodka-soaked first partner, Boris Yeltsin. Putin by contrast was “a man we can do business with,” a “liberal, humane, and decent European” of “alert, controlled poise” and “well-briefed acuity,” who was open to anything, even Russia joining NATO. “I don’t see why not,” Putin said. “I would not rule out such a possibility.”

Fourth, this excerpt is from Glenn Greenwald's detailed analysis of our tribal dysfunction that mushroom when that exciting topic of war hits the tabletop:

In the weeks leading up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, those warning of the possible dangers of U.S. involvement were assured that such concerns were baseless. The prevailing line insisted that nobody in Washington is even considering let alone advocating that the U.S. become militarily involved in a conflict with Russia. That the concern was based not on the belief that the U.S. would actively seek such a war, but rather on the oft-unintended consequences of being swamped with war propaganda and the high levels of tribalism, jingoism and emotionalism that accompany it, was ignored. It did not matter how many wars one could point to in history that began unintentionally, with unchecked, dangerous tensions spiraling out of control. Anyone warning of this obviously dangerous possibility was met with the “straw man” cliché: you are arguing against a position that literally nobody in D.C. is defending.

. . .

There is a reason I devoted the first fifteen minutes of my live video broadcast on Thursday about Ukraine not to the history that led us here and the substance of the conflict (I discussed that in the second half), but instead to the climate that arises whenever a new war erupts, instantly creating propaganda-driven, dissent-free consensus. There is no propaganda as potent or powerful as war propaganda. It seems that one must have lived through it at least once, as an engaged adult, to understand how it functions, how it manipulates and distorts, and how one can resist being consumed by it.

I will end with a photo:

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“Race,” “News Media” and Shootings

I often use the word "race" in scare quotes because I don't believe that "race" is a useful phrase. In fact, it has caused nothing but mischief, violence and death ever since people began using the term. My position is that there are definitely some racists out there, but there is no such thing as "race." I have put the term "news media" in quotes because I have lost so much respect for so many of those organizations that claim to be bringing us the news based on numerous recent examples of a course of conduct that is more egregious than the negligence standard one might associate with journalism malpractice.

Political Scientist Wilfred Reilly is not afraid to step into the fray to state unvarnished truth. He is a former corporate executive and freedom rider, as well as author of the 2020 book Taboo: 10 Facts [You Can't Talk About].  In his introduction to that book, he states:

Tackling taboos is difficult, but necessary. Very often— MOST often— they are used not to shield strong and valid ideas from pointless attacks, but rather to protect weak ones from worthwhile criticism.

Reilly's statistics-rich discussion is now featured on FAIR's website: His article is titled, "The Broken Mirror: Media Narrative vs. Reality." The "news media" that leans politically to the Left is forcefully pushing a media is making people on the political Left unnecessarily angry (against police officers), but it should be making all of us angry (about the divisive narrative being pushed). Here is an excerpt:

In the representative year of 2018, inter-racial violent crime involving blacks and whites made up approximately 3 percent of all serious crime: there were only about 600,000 victim-reported incidents involving a black perpetrator and a white victim, or vice-versa, out of more than 20,000,000 total crimes. Further, of the violent inter-racial crime that does occur, more than 80 percent of reported incidents involved a black perpetrator and a white victim. The data tables in the 2018 Bureau of Justice Statistics Report include more than 500,000 black-on-white violent incidents, but well under 100,000 violent crimes that were white-on-black. While this finding is not necessarily surprising—there are far more whites than blacks, and whites, on average, have more money to be stolen—it would likely come as a shock to most upper-middle class Americans. As would another piece of data: according to the Washington Post, the total number of unarmed black men killed by police during the most recent year on record (2020) was not 10,000, or 1,000, but 17. That bears spelling out: in the year where America was supposedly inundated with white supremacist violence, where America was in the grips of a “racial reckoning” that included, in no small part, the acknowledgement of the “state-sanctioned murder” of young black men, only SEVENTEEN unarmed black men died at the hands of police officers.

This data leads us to an obvious question: why do so many smart people believe inter-ethnic violence is so much worse than it is? . . .Basic data about inter-racial violence often seem not merely ignored by mainstream media sources, but actively misrepresented.

In Taboo, I point out that about 75 percent of individuals fatally shot by police in a typical year are Caucasian whites or Hispanics. However, national media outlets devote less than 20 percent of their police violence coverage to these cases. A Google search for “well-known police shooting,” conducted in 2020 in connection with the book, turned up articles which covered two police shootings of Latinos, four police shootings of whites, and 36 police shootings of blacks. This level of over-representation of black victims in coverage (2,400 percent) could hardly be the result of anything but very conscious choice—and respected social scientists like John Lott have argued empirically that media treatment of a range of issues, from political extremism to mass shootings, follows a similar troubling pattern.

I'm not going to pretend that I could add anything to Reilly's detailed analysis, but reading his article did cause me to wonder whether part of the media strategy was to stir up conflict and hate, thereby selling ads and rewarding loyal followers. As I read Reilly's statistics, I can't help but think of Matt Taibbi's book, Hate, Inc., in which he argues "that what most people think of as 'the news' is, in fact, a twisted wing of the entertainment business.

At the conclusion of his article, Reilly argues that it's time for the new outlets to step up and do real journalism:

In order for our country to truly address the vestiges of racism that still exist, it’s essential that the media provide a clear and honest picture of racial relations in contemporary America.

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Our Modern Tower of Babel

This is a riveting and disheartening tweet-thread, begun when Brent Williams asked a rather simple question: "Name all the words that have a different meaning now then they did in 2019."

Check out the thread. Many of these suggestions seem spot-on. No wonder we have such a difficult time talking with each other. No wonder so many have given up trying to converse with people from other tribes. We are living in modern-day Babbel. Here are some of the many candidates mentioned in the tweet-thread:

Dangerous Conversion Therapy Woman. Man. Phobia Healthy Vaccine Science Freedom Pandemic Insurrection Vaccine Racism and Racist Gain of Function Public health expert Gender Misinformation Left Wing and Right Wing, Liberal and Conservative Peaceful Violence Fact-Checker Truth Equality Fascist Conspiracy Theory Safe Trusted Freedom Infrastructure Progressive Fact Anti-vaxxer Inclusion Diversity News Reporting Tolerance

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