The roots of denialism: How reason and science have been supplanted by conspiracy theories and lies. By JackHitt
In business schools, there's a little parable that gets spun about the indomitable genius of American scientists and ... car tires.
Over the next few years, smog was obviously coming from sources far beyond Aliso Street and began to blanket the entire city. On still mornings, the haze thickened, and a panic settled in."Smog interferes with thought processes," a local doctor informed the county supervisors,"inducing fear, anxiety, and general 'mental tailspin,' including 'globus hystericus,' an imaginary lump in the throat which provokes continuous swallowing.
It didn't take Haagen-Smit long to solve the mystery. Smog was what happened when hydrocarbons, created mostly by refineries and cars, were released into LA's famously bright sunshine. The light prompted a chemical reaction, oxidizing the molecules into smog. Haagen-Smit's findings"assume great importance," the Associated Press reported in 1952,"because they have been accepted as fact — and a basis for action — by the county's air pollution control district.
No self-respecting fake institute today would make such naive mistakes. Nor would it be so foolish as to hire a respected scientist to take down another respected scientist. But that's how SRI started. It paid Harold Johnston, an atmospheric scientist who later garnered acclaim for his work on the ozone layer, to shoot down Haagen-Smit's findings. Instead, Johnston replicated Haagen-Smit's work and declared him a genius for figuring out the true cause of smog. Johnston was fired.
The point was to create, in the minds of smokers, enough doubt in the rock-solid scientific truth that they would keep on smoking. In 1969, an internal Brown and Williamson memo summed up the intent of the industry's anti-science stance."Doubt is our product," the memo explained,"since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the mind of the general public.
As it happens, 1998 was a key year in tobacco history. Nearly every state attorney general in America sued Big Tobacco for the massive tax burden created by caring for the industry's dying customers. The attorneys general won a historic $206 billion settlement. After that, the industry gave up on Hill & Knowlton's talking points, mostly because the US market had become so negligible.
Still, the industry needed something more to undermine the mounting evidence that human-caused climate change was a Fact, as Jefferson would have called it. The year after Gingrich and Pelosi sat down together on that couch, with Congress poised to enact bipartisan legislation to regulate planet-warming pollution, climate deniers made another giant advance in the mechanics of modern truth-dismantling.
In the coming years, eight different reports would exonerate the climate scientists of anything scandalous. But by then, the damage was done. The emails, which leaked just a few weeks before the Copenhagen climate conference, helped divert attention from the world's best shot at addressing the climate crisis. But more important, they managed to replace an accepted truth with a nonexistent scandal. The bold new attack on science was a triumphant success.
The Trump presidency has upended the entire Enlightenment experiment that Jefferson had outlined to a candid world. Until that moment, every aspect of modern life had been oriented around the ideal of rationality. Spy agencies, at least in theory, were supposed to supply good, solid intelligence so a president could discern the best possible course of action. Journalists were supposed to gather reliable information, albeit in a hurry, and bang out a first rough draft of what just happened.
Take one small example: the election rumor that Trump voters were having their votes canceled because their Sharpies bled through the ballots. One voter who used a Sharpie at the polling site in her precinct was informed by the screen on the voting machine that her ballot had been canceled. She immediately jumped on Twitter, offering absolute proof that Democrat ogres at the election board were carrying out nefarious schemes, just as everybody said.
Starbird has seen this process play out over and over again, going back to the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013. At the time, social media generated a host of conspiracy theories that the terrorism was committed by almost anyone besides the actual bombers, the Tsarnaev brothers."First it was the Navy SEAL that did it," Starbird recalled."Then it was Blackwater security agents. It went on and on, for all these different suspects.
Now imagine your tweet gets picked up by one of the top celebrity spotlighters in the political generator. Imagine the surge of powerful emotions as your new truth goes viral. And imagine how trite it would seem when a lamestream media type starts his nerdy whining about"facts," when your 240 characters were liked by Eric Trump's wife?
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