No foreplay this time; no room for it if we’re to complete Chapter 6 in this Raspberry Patch post.
Chapter 6. “Doing a Ripley”: Spectacle Defined and Illustrated, cont’d.
. . . We saw yet another Ripley with the early November 2022 attack on Paul Pelosi. The perpetrator of the attack, an illegal immigrant from Canada (ironically enough) named David DePape, confessed what he was up to: He was looking for the Speaker of the House so to kidnap her and break her knees with a hammer unless she admitted her evil ways. Within hours the MAGA mendacity circus started peddling an alternative fake narrative: The glass of the Pelosi residence was purportedly broken from the inside out, Paul Pelosi knew the intruder who was his homosexual lover; DePape’s “Where’s Nancy?” utterance had to do with verifying that Paul’s wife was not at home, and so on. Within 72 hours DePape became a MAGA hero; calls went out for the faithful to pony up dollars to bail him out of jail.[1]
Along the way to this particular carnival extravaganza both Roger Stone and Donald Trump suggested alternatively that the whole supposed attack might have been staged. Neither asserted that the attack was staged, only that it might have been. That is all that is necessary; the perpetual semi-mesmerization of the intended targets can be counted on to do the rest, moving seamlessly from might have been to was. Think of the alternatives as a menu: the homosexual lover story for the merely crazed; the staged version for the truly, exceptionally whacked.
Of course, the it-was-staged “not-A” conjured-out-of-thin-air version contradicted the homosexual lover scenario, since both obviously could not be true. One might therefore suppose that this knock-on malarkey annoyed some MAGA fabricators who thought they had already cooked a solid, believable lie. But in a spectacalized para-adolescent subculture the existence of parallel but contradictory Ripleys is not all that problematic. That is because the mythic-consciousness law of metamorphosis is at work on the loony Right no less than on the loony Left: Anything can turn into or be anything else, and serial timelines are shaky if they exist at all such that the usual psychology of contradiction is attenuated if not altogether suspended. Contradiction is not nugatory in a mythic mindset; it is merely attention-arresting.
The examples seem never to cease, since they remain necessary. Thus, on December 11, 2023 Donald Trump said that if he is re-elected in November 2024 he would be a dictator only on day one. Since no such thing is possible, since what it takes to become a dictator precludes easy reversal into a prior normality, the MAGA gaffe squad leapt into the widening puddle of Trump’s illogic with what has become its standard roll of magical duct tape: He was kidding; it was just his witty sense of humor at work again, thus: “Trump’s superpower is that he’s the most quick witted leader in a generation. Every grown man hyperventilating about this clip needs to find a sense of humor.” (J.D. Vance ); “I think it was a joke.” (Lindsey Graham); “It’s entertainment. And, you know, we’ve been around him long enough. It’s entertaining.” (Michael McCaul, R., TX); and“We all know Trump uses unique expressions when he explains things.” ( James Comer, R., KY). Oh yes, statements about suspending the Constitution and becoming a dictator as Trump continues to praise the world’s extant dictators for being “strong leaders.” Oh, very funny, so entertaining. Ha, ha…….ha?
As to Representative Comer, he has ranked as one of the weirdest liars in the MAGAt circle. In August 2024 he voiced suspicions that Tim Walz might be a secret communist—Walz, a man who has reveled in piglet caressing at the Minnesota State Fair.[2] Comer seems to have been making a play for the residual Joe McCarthy crowd, all 26 of them still alive. Alas, stuff likes this works anyway on the cult-addled, who satisfice with respect to any word clots that align with their biases. Besides: Anyone capable of taking QAnon seriously is capable of believing just about anything. Sensing contradiction is attenuated as well by the absence of any ability to focus on a subject; distraction is a wonderful way to segment perceptions so that dots never connect, only the fanciful “clearer than the truth” ones of coincidence-festooned conspiracy theories.
In this case, Trump seems to have been channeling one of Alex Jones’s favorite approaches to trouble: something bad happens, just say it was staged, thus magically transferring any moral negativity onto the other side. It’s another default tic along the lines of the juvenile schoolyard “I know you are but what am I?” taunt, but as with all tics it reveals something deeper: That Trump attributes an attempt at fabricated spectacle to others just shows how present it is in his own mind. It is tellingly inadvertent as projection. Trump is not just a cross between a wannabe mafia don (illustrated by how Trump worded his anti-Semitic threat that American Jews “you have a nice religion there; it’d be a shame to lose it”) and a 9-year old spoiled brat. He is an expert spectacle-manipulating cross between a wannabe mafia don and a 9-year old spoiled brat. That’s unusual, even for an American magnifico.
He may also want, or have wanted in the past, to be a paid Russian agent. This possibility was, of course, raised often and early because his views on Russia and Putin seemed so very Manchurian. Most observers, however, found this idea much too fanciful, reasoning that the Russians would never recruit anyone so unreliable and easily found out. Better to use him, via business incentives, as a classical useful idiot. So most came to conclude that Trump’s pro-Russian tilt had to do with business, past and prospective, since it is clear that his 2016 campaign infomercial was never intended to actually elect him President.
Trump’s more recent fulminations against the “deep state” have not changed anything in essence. His March 2023 tweet threatening to clean out the Defense Department, the State Department, and the intelligence community because they compose a deep state trying to involve the United States in a war with Russia omitted any rationale for why an American deep state, if it existed, would seek a war with Russia. It was just another Ripley flip-flop, albeit a spectacular one. It, too, was projectile in the sense that it posited a deeply hidden evil conspiracy, roughly analogous to the planned MAGA conspiracy to steal the 2024 election if necessary. The “deep state” talk works as a kind of all-purpose projectile device; without it, QAnon could not have arisen and still exist and neither could Frazzledrip and other associated nonsense. Conspiracy projection out of an obsessive conspiracy mentality is the setting for the narrative development of the MAGA world, as needed tactically at any given time to fob off those who sense and would reveal the truth about the zero-sum, by-any-means-necessary Randian essence of Trump’s brain.
In any event, in a media circus covering a MAGA carnival-quality projective lie, especially a social media circus where rules of evidence seem barely to exist, no viewer has direct evidence of what actually happened. All that is required for sub-deep-literate people already inured to bias is to create enough ambiguity that uncertainty rises sufficiently high to then be summarily bent in the desired biased direction. In short, “Doing a Ripley” either preemptively or post hoc is the MAGA world’s default drive, and for a simple reason: It works. No matter how transparently absurd it is to almost anyone living in the real world instead of inside some dank metaversal video game, it still works as a form of tendentious transactionalism par excellance.
There is of course a social element to this: If a person associates mainly with pro-MAGA others, peer pressure is usually enough to suppress any dissent from the not-A interpretation of events. It’s the rightwing populist analogue to Pauline Kael à la 1972. And if Solomon Asch’s seminal experiments in conformity are a guide—as they should be—sufficient peer pressure not only stifles voiced dissent but also smothers nearly all wisps of doubt in the subject’s own head. So the targets of MAGA entrepreneurs really come to think that “not-A” is the reality, and the reality is invariably a conspiracy or something like one.
The fact that what the deluded have to hand of the evidence for “A” and the evidence for “not-A” is not conclusive one way or the other, and that ambiguity therefore reigns amid the uncertainty, can be fatiguing. It resembles cognitively a kind of “on the one hand/on the other hand” infinite regress. Once it becomes clear that no amount of fact filtering will ever lead to a conclusion, going with the bias of one’s peer group becomes tantamount to a surrender to the unsolvable. It removes anxiety. It may not be fully rational, but then what is for most people?
Nothing illustrated Doing a Ripley better than the competition to astound the target audience than the Republican primary carnival of late summer and autumn 2023. As Donald Trump was getting better at his perp walks, many lesser contenders vied with one another to present the most attention-arresting two-headed calves they could think up. Joe Biden stole the 2020 election: standard two-headed calf, so no advantage there beyond the obligation to recite it. Mike Pence betrayed the President and the nation on January 6, 2021: that one still got a rise. Vladimir Putin is more trustworthy than the U.S. intelligence community: a two-headed calf that made a loud noise. The original birthers were right, and both 9/11 and 1/6 were inside jobs, just like Sandy Hook: This was near the top of the shock bar, a trifecta of inanity certain to attract attention. We heard all of this and more.
Some GOP hopefuls early in the 2024 campaign season hedged their bets, believing that the primary electorate was on the whole not quite that crazy, so we heard discrete proposals instead: Ban all Muslims from entering the United States; pass a nationwide six-week abortion ban; withdraw the United States from NATO; repeal all global-warming related regulation since “climate change” is a hoax. That last one did resemble a two-headed carnival calf, but the others were mere red noise that, while they failed to reach to the top of the spectacle shock bar, suggested policy ideas…because a political party is supposed to have some. Was all this entertaining? Sure, in a lurid and depressing way. But entertainment is entertainment, and our novelty bias makes it almost impossible to look away from it—and the more spectacular its fabrication the harder not to see it.
Conditioning for Spectacle
Major spectacle produces a “wow” when we see it, arresting our attention by way of its cognitive structure, as we have already laid out. But the same structure abides less fulsomely when people play video games like “Candy Crunch,” gamble on slot machines, do jigsaw puzzling and online “spelling bee” solving, among many such activities—anything that involves intermittent reward stimuli. This is what hooks us, driving us onward to engage in low-level bouts of what amounts to dopamine masturbation. It fixes our appetite for near-constant entertainment at gluttonous levels. We as a culture are deep into quotidian sub-wow behaviors that condition us for spectacle: We don’t know when to stop and often don’t know how to stop.
As already discussed, our gluttony has a measurable biochemical dimension. Urban life even before the cyberlution produced a characteristic hormonal rhythm different from that of people living in the quieter, slower, and less-right-angled countryside. But now our body’s biochemical default activation levels are like nothing that evolution prepared our brains and sensory apparatus to handle. Indeed, while we do not know with any precision what our forebears two thousand years ago considered to be fun, or even if they had a word meaning just that, or what their thresholds for dopamine flows were, it may well be that entertainment-besotted 21st century Americans produce significantly more dopamine per capita per day than our pre-affluence ancestors.
Several overlapping reasons help account for the burgeoning popularity of mini-wow, dopamine-producing activities. One reason is how democratized the delivery systems have become; democratized in the sense that no one needs to be able to read beyond a third-grade level to work them. Indeed, most Instagram and TikTok fare requires no ability to read whatsoever. The main reason, however, has to do with cybertechnology’s ability to produce a condition of continuous partial attention to multiple stimuli. Too many of us have become addicted to distraction, the most powerful “drug” involved in this addiction being the Magical Rectangles we call smartphones.
There is no mystery about how Magic Rectangles addict users to distraction. As Nina Powell, a senior psychology lecturer at the National University of Singapore put it, “Dopamine is a neurotransmitter associated with pleasure. Notifications trigger dopamine release, and motivates us to do more of what causes the release, like checking your phone.” Some people do this even while walking around in traffic, and some do not live to tell tales.[3] Hence neuroscientist Daniel Levitin’s conclusion: “[M]ultitasking creates a dopamine addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus, and for constantly searching for external stimulation.”[4] Nicholas Carr put the same point well in lay language in The Shallows, “. . .the Net seizes our attention only to scatter it.”
Why don’t more people realize what is happening to them as the digital age scrambles and rewires their brains? Well, because they are too distracted to focus, and so around and down we as a society have gone as general recognition of the problem has been obviated by the very nature of the problem. Hopefully, that particular doom-loop is easing as ever more people become aware of cyberaddictions. But it’s a race: Dopamine masturbation addiction happens fast, since the circuitry in a smartphone operates about seven times faster than the circuitry in the human brain. Straining to catch up with the machine creates further knock-on effects: It’s exhausting, and it rewards impatience. The combination dramatically reduces the likelihood that the screen addict will pause, consider, and ask, in effect, “What the hell am I doing to myself?”
So we increasingly incline to bounce from one online intermittent reward dispenser to another, the process whetting our appetite for such stimuli both online and off. As to the former, our smartphones employ “captology” techniques to keep our attention glued to the screen. Swiping is one captological technique, and the ease of continuous scrolling—called doomscrolling by critics—is another. We have come a long way from Vance Packard’s 1957 best-seller The Hidden Persuaders, and even a longer way from Bernays aforementioned 1929 book Propaganda. But then as now the basic principle is the same: It’s all about the deliberate manipulation of our novelty bias with one shiny visual image after another.
In Bernays’ day there was radio and afterwards television to serve as a delivery system. Now we have the reeling reels of Instagram; the selfies and cute kitties of Facebook; the TikTok and YouTube shorts; and all the rest of the shiny objects that keep us fixated on trivia, conspiracies, and fast-food quality entertainments for hours on end. The tech giants employ brilliant software engineers and cognitive scientists to commandeer our attention, and advertisers have gathered—partly by buying it from a variety of high-tech-enabled collectors[5]—huge amounts of focused personal data through surveillance and data-inference technology. Taken together, these high-paid professionals are much better at getting to the bottom of our brainstem to influence how we spend our money (and incur debt spending money we don’t have) than we are, as Richard Cytowic puts it, at “defending the inherent weaknesses” of our biology.
This is happening now at scale thanks to the internet and the portable gadgets that link us to it: Something like three billon people, nearly a third of the world’s population, are each and every day being sidetracked and manipulated far more effectively—with the casually proffered consent of the manipulated—than the most repressive dictatorships in history could ever have hoped to do. Technology has always changed us and affected our neuronal wiring, of course; but not like this. B.F. Skinner, for all the harm he caused, wisely followed Norbert Wiener’s lead from 1948 when he noted in his otherwise odious 1971 book Beyond Freedom and Dignity that machines were capable, if put in the wrong hands, of being key to “a system of slavery so well designed that that it does not breed revolt. . .” It was an odd moment of lucidity and a contradiction of Skinner’s argument that the illusion of human free will and moral autonomy stood in the way of using scientific means of behavior modification to make people happier and healthier without the muss and fuss of involving them in actual decisions about their own lives.
Skinner was clueless as to the far more plausible future, already anticipatable in 1971, in which corporate oligarchs, like those embodied in Meta, Google, Apple, and a few other high-tech behemoths today, would push cognitive distraction on pleasure-seekers for profit the same way that the major tobacco companies had long pushed nicotine addiction. But is it really fair to characterize the corporate digital lords of our day as “pushers”? The analogy isn’t perfect—none are—but, well, yes, it is fair. Whatever positive utility they provide they are doing great harm, and they know it, and they continue to do it anyway.
And meanwhile, the super-abundance of mini-wow indulgences that these corporations enable populate our abundant postmodern leisure time set the stage for the real thing: the major wows of spectacle, which we can marinate in thanks to the ubiquity of high-tech fantasy entertainment at our fingertips. In a sense, addiction to distraction, the work of what Christopher Mims called “the distraction-industrial complex” in a June 29, 2014 Wall Street Journal article, is the on-ramp to addiction to spectacle: When the mind cannot settle and focus on any one thing, it is easy for the next astounding complex directed at us to hijack our attention. When the next big thing appears, no matter the source or motive, we can’t not look at it. Our brain’s evolved novelty bias will not relent.
The mass electronic media particularly eats it up but, more importantly, mimics and produces it. It is difficult to say exactly when commercial U.S. broadcast media adopted the two-headed carnival cow as its private mascot. The Kennedy assassination and funeral in late November 1963 marked the first obsessive media focus modeled on the pre-existent fictive template. The extended “America Held Hostage” episode of 1979-80 that essentially vaulted CNN into first-tier media status—Ted Koppel with it—marked an important deepening of the trend. The full-fledged obsessive/fictive framing for broadcast news was born, arguably, only with the O.J. Simpson “White Bronco” extravaganza of June 1994. Since then major cable news outlets have been copying it whenever an opportunity arrives or can be invented: the Monica Lewinsky affair; the 2000 hanging chad election recount; weeks of post-9/11 coverage; and on and on.[6]
However and whenever it started, the spectacle-fiction media model certainly provided Donald Trump with billions of dollars worth of free exposure in 2015-16. It is no exaggeration to say that self-avowed liberal media elites helped elect Donald Trump President of the United States. For narrow business reasons they chose to ignore the fact that far too many of us are more than willing to suspend any residual inner knowledge of the difference between what is real and what is not to luxuriate in the thrill of the latest two-headed calf to come our way. The screen-delivered broadcast media, liberal, conservative and everything in between, essentially did a year-long “White Bronco,” going wall-to-wall with Donald Trump, turning a reality-TV and WWF fakester into a real President of the United States.
They did it for the money. “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS,” famously declared Les Moonves. He did not limit himself to that remark, either. He called the campaign a “circus” full of “bomb throwing” and said he
hopes it continues. . . . Man, who would have expected the ride we’re all having right now?. . . . The money’s rolling in and this is fun. I’ve never seen anything like this, and this going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going.[7]
Donald did, and now people like Moonves wonder why so many Americans see him as an exemplar of selfish elitist stupidity. The stupidity and cowardice continue to this day, the commercial broadcast media being as stuck as before in its destructive business model that sprays shrapnel into American politics. As Dave Barry put it in his 2023 annual review, the news media “need Trump the way tomatoes need manure.”
Heaven forbid we should ever be bored. Whiz-bang entertainment has rewired our brains to expect, want, seek, and luxuriate in spectacle, small and large. It simply has not yet occurred to enough of us what that portends for rational political discourse in a liberal democracy: If we go to a circus every day, we’re going to see a lot of clowns, some of whom may not have our best interests at heart—and we may eventually lose our way out of the tent. Jonathan V. Last has argued plausibly that this is already a done deal:
. . . broadcast media, as much as any other factor, has driven the collapse of American political life. It has changed the incentive structures for both politicians and journalists. It created a sense of manic obsessiveness in the public. And it acted as an accelerant in our ongoing polarization.[8]
Last is not wrong, but he may be exaggerating the role of broadcast media and underplaying the power of internet influencers, many of whom have vastly larger audiences than Fox News. Influencers on the internet do tend to be less directly political than bought-and-sold broadcast news like Rupert Murdoch’s Fox operation, but the spectacular insanity they generate works as antecedent conditioning for on-lays of political surrealism to stick. By way of example is an influencer going by the name of Amazing Polly.
Amazing Polly started off with a seemingly anodyne gardening vblog but then shapeshifted after developing a following. In 2020 during COVID she concocted a wild conspiracy theory claiming that the girls’ names for expensive Wayfare filing cabinets hid a grotesque human trafficking business. The craziness went viral, QAnon glommed onto it, and Amazing Polly made a lot of money.[9] The point, however, is that anyone gullible enough to believe that was primed to also believe QAnon shaman Jacob Chansley. No sharp dividing line exists anymore between general-issue surreality and political surreality. And in the dynamic linking the provinces of surreality nothing speeds and congeals the process like the internet.
Be all that as it may, still Donald Trump’s free media exposure, indictment after indictment, mendacity after mendacity, continues and arguably deepens by the day. The circular connection at play here is stunning: The media help to legitimate Trump, and once legitimated the media can then excuse themselves for ceaselessly covering him.
This is true of the broadcast media generally, but the rightwing media is a specialized, bespoke example of the general case. It, and Tucker Carlson in particular before his well-deserved fall, has furnished no end of excellent examples. Carlson’s projective spectacle enabled him to become the post-rational Republican Party’s kingmaker. He managed to drive Donald Trump and Ron de Santis according to his agenda toward a pro-Russian U.S. foreign policy.
As with Trump six years earlier, Carlson’s conspiracy-addled antics led some to wonder if he was a Russian agent, since he often mimicked Russian propaganda almost word for word. He did just that in March 2023 over the Ukraine War using spectacle against “moist robots”—barstool conservatives, mostly—with skills that a newly minted psychology Ph.D. gone to work for a large tech corporation usually displays. Maybe he, not Trump, has long been the once-removed Manchurian candidate. Whether he is or not, “he knows that he has an audience that he has to keep ramped up on a constant dopamine hit,” wrote Reed Galen, co-founder of the Lincoln Project and a former Alliance Party associate of mine.[10] “It’s quite something to see the power that Tucker Carlson has amassed. I don’t want to call it amazing, but it’s interesting and certainly concerning.” (Reed: You should have said not amazing but “spectacular.”)
The internalized demands of the attention economy, now become the spectacle economy, have by now insinuated their way into almost every nook and cranny of American life. Even otherwise respectable organizations worry themselves over getting noticed, even U.S. Government agencies and departments concerned about the relationship between their public visibility and reputation on the one hand and next year’s Federal budget allotment on the other. This is part of the mix of softening-up phenomena that provides the on-ramp for the big “wows” of spectacle to find such large audiences and to have such outsized impacts.
To the Neuroscience
In sum, cybertech plays a twin role in vaulting spectacle into our politics at scale: in the little things that prime us for the big things that wow and also exploit many of us. As a result, when we show how the cyberlution is rewiring our brains to expect, want, seek, and luxuriate in spectacle it is no mere metaphor; it is neurocognitive fact that deserves description as a mentality. And again note: This rewiring brings in tandem an biochemical state of arousal that is significantly at odds with the evolutionary norm of our endocrine system. It may be, in ways still to be discovered, driving a lot of us clinically crazy.
While spectacle has become the currency of what it is fair to call intense leisure, not everyone in American and other technologically cyberized societies is equally vulnerable to its misanthropies. Those who immerse themselves in digital cyber-fantasies and do not deep read are far more vulnerable to having others manipulate their novelty bias than those with different habits or tastes in how to invest time. It is fine to do puzzles and watch high-tech graphic escapist fantasy from time to time, but it is bad for your grip on reality, and on your capacity to act like a adult in a messy world full of edge-fuzzed choices, to do it too much, especially as a solo act. We all need to stand on solid ground in the company of others now and again, or we risk losing track of where solid ground is and what normal social intercourse feels like. We need to guard against life as it looks in funhouse mirrors becoming too comfortable an ideational environment for us.
We need particularly to segregate our passion for technologized entertainment from polluting our politics, lest we allow an unbridgeable chasm to develop between the Enlightenment-informed attitudes that enable our most cherished institutions to function and what may be on the other, reality unmoored side of the looking glass. But let’s be honest: The technology is so alluring as a means of delivering easy entertainment, and most of us are so affluent that we have ample time to consume it, that it would be disingenuous to suggest that any “no sweat” fix exists here. Those who have managed to sidestep spectacle-cum-mentality either have sturdy pre-digitized cognitive habits, live in a cloistered religious community, have sensed the danger and have either gone off grid or at least figured new ways to avoid excessive indulgence. The Kurt Steiners and the Yisroel Hagars of the world do exist, but they’re scarce.[11]
Some stalwart cyber-refusniks at the beginning of the deluge have thrown in the towel with clinging, but not entirely satisfying, qualifications.[12] No, we behold a cultural revolution in the new mentality, or would behold one had we an Archimedean point far enough away to stand on so that we could see the bigger picture. Sometimes it seems as though the remaining resisters may soon have no choice but to research the location of the nearest monastery, ashram, or aging-hippie commune, or else found a new one.
One may argue that this entire ball of wax is just the paranoid style of American politics making another appearance, and in some ways it is. Americans have long been skeptical of centralized political authority, those hailing from the Scots-Irish hearth culture especially so.[13] There are good historical reasons for this, and plenty of vivid examples—both the Shay’s and Whisky Rebellions of the early American independence era among them. But in a time of de-literacized, vanishing adults the sheer scale of such episodes threatens to overwhelm the body politic’s capacity for reality-based normality. Here the global context matters, as well.
Trust in central government in the United States tends to rise during wartime and extended national security emergencies, as during the early Cold War years, and it bends back to the mean when those emergencies end or recede. Before bending back, historically unusual accumulations of trust enable the Federal government to do things in domestic policy areas that it otherwise would find much more difficult to do--things like creating a National Academy of Science and a national banking system during the Civil War, creating Social Security during the Depression and World War II, and pursuing desegregation and creating Medicare and Medicaid during the Cold War.[14] In historically more normal times, however, seeing malefaction and even conspiracy in all central political authority, in addition to having given rise to the “anonymous they”—the necessarily vague reference to whomever the conspirators are dimly imagined to be—tends to produce an almost childlike willingness to believe those who posit conspiracies. As Kurt Andersen put it, “Extreme credulity is a fraternal twin of extreme skepticism.”[15]
If national security crises tend to depress the spectacle mentality, all else equal, their absence contrarily creates a more permissive environment for it. A good example of scale pertains to the most infamous media example of “not-A” conspiracy lying: Alex Jones’s contention that the December 2012 Sandy Hook massacre was all staged to garner pressure for elite-favored gun control. An astonishing number of seemingly adult Americans believed this, just as a similar but presumably smaller crowd has long been certain that no human ever walked on the moon. Thanks to the courts, Jones has been forced to admit that he was wrong, but not that he lied. His admission therefore still leaves Ripley-like uncertainties on the table: Did Jones really believe his own nonsense at the time, or did he peddle it to the credulous just to make money? Was his admission of error an act concocted to avoid a harsher punishment, or was it sincere? We still can’t be sure.
In any event, the trial verdict has not affected Jones’s business model or dissuaded other grifters from attempting similar cons. Jones’s punishment was merely financial. He pulled no jail time despite the deep anguish he caused the families of the slain Sandy Hook children. He lied cunningly, and so what? It just is what it is in spectacalized America, where the justice system has gone morally numb as it fails to adapt to the new reality, and, looking at the current the Supreme Court, may never do so.
[1] See Annie Karni, Malika Khurana, and Stuart A. Thompson, “How Republicans Fed a Misinformation Loop About the Pelosi Attack,” New York Times, November 5, 2022.
[2] See Joe Perticone, “James Comer Suspects Tim Walz is a Secret Communist,” The Bulwark, August 29, 2024.
[3] Powell quoted in BNB Diviyadhaarshini, Christine Siow, and Rebekah Chia, “Deadly addiction: Why do some pedestrians use their phones despite the risks?” Straits Times, May 14, 2023. In addition, in 2018 a study project at Ohio State University documented a redoubling in the United States in pedestrian cell-phone-related deaths--more than 6,000 annually, after having previously doubled between 2005 and 2010 to about 3,000. Some localities have tried to dissuade and protect “phombies” from killing themselves in traffic by threatening to fine anyone big bucks if caught crossing a street while staring at their phone. The threat has not worked; the addictive power of the screens is too great.
[4] Daniel Levitin, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload (Dutton, 2014), p. 96.
[5] When you call your bank, pharmacy, insurance company, or other large organizations, you often hear a message informing you that the call is being recorded for training purposes. That is often a lie. The call is likely being recorded for data-mining purposes. Your tone of voice and general speech patterns carry clues about your age, personality, ethnicity, education, standard of living, and even your health. These voice tracks are then sold to data-analytic companies, which in turn sell them on to advertisers and professional political consultants. This is also a reason not to joust in conversation with spammers trying to scam you; if the scam is large enough, the managers may be recording your voice for later nefarious uses.
[6] Jonathan V. Last, “A Message for the People Who Run Cable News: You’re Doing It Again. Stop It.” The Bulwark, August 4, 2023.
[7] See Paul Bond in “Leslie Moonves on Donald Trump: “It May Not Be Good for America, but It’s Damn Good for CBS,” The Hollywood Reporter, February 26, 2016.
[8] Ibid.
[9] For details and numbers concerning influencers see DiResta, Invisible Rulers, and on the Wayfare conspiracy theory see also “Wayfare: The false conspiracy about a furniture firm and child trafficking,” BBC News, July 15, 2020.
[10] Galen quoted in Josie Ensor, “Tucker Carlson: Is this the man in America turning the Ukraine War for Vladimir Putin?” Telegraph, March 18, 2023.
[11] On Steiner see Sean Williams, “Stone Skipping Is a Lost Art. Kurt Steiner Wants the World to Find It,” Outside, September 20, 2022. Yisroel Hagar is the Vishnitzer Rebbe; he banned the use of smartphones among his followers.
[12] See the surrender declaration of Sven Birkerts, the original “refuse it” warrior, and author of the brilliant and prophetic 1995 book The Gutenberg Elegies: “Cyberjitsu,” The American Interest, October 17, 2017.
[13] Extensively described in David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed (Oxford University Press, 1989).
[14] See H.W. Brands, The Strange Death of American Liberalism (Yale University Press, 2001).
[15] Andersen, Fantasyland, p. 116.