\n\n“American insurrectionists, for the first time in the history of this country, stormed the US Capitol on Wednesday. Offices were vandalized. Windows were broken. Statues toppled. A woman was shot and killed. Four others have reportedly died, including a Capitol Police officer. It was ugly, embarrassing, and seditious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But it wasn\u2019t surprising.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We\u2019ve been inching, inexorably, toward this moment for years. I know this because I\u2019ve spent an inordinate amount of time over the course of this presidency thinking and writing about what you might call the \u201cepistemic crisis\u201d<\/a> or the \u201cpost-truth crisis\u201d or the \u201cmisinformation crisis\u201d \u2014 it all refers more or less to the same thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The American mind, or a sizable chunk of it at least, has been deranged by a poisoned information system. The way millions of citizens learn about the world, the way they form core beliefs, is irredeemably broken. And because the media environment has been blown apart by digital technology, \u201cthere is no longer any buffer between mainstream thought and the extreme elements of our politics,\u201d as Politico\u2019s Tim Alberta<\/a> put it recently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If the depth of that crisis wasn\u2019t apparent before Wednesday, it sure as hell is now.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n …<\/p>\n\n\n\n “The road to this dark place was paved by lots of hands over many years. But the evolution of right-wing media into a fantasy-industrial complex is at the center of the story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Propaganda has always been a bipartisan game, but media-driven polarization has become more asymmetric in recent years. The left mostly<\/a> receives its news from organizations like the New York Times, the Washington Post, or cable news networks like MSNBC or CNN. However biased some of this reporting can be (and there\u2019s plenty of bias), most of it is anchored by basic journalistic ethics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This just isn\u2019t true on the right. A 2018 book called Network Propaganda<\/em><\/a> by three Harvard researchers is probably the best survey on this disparity, and it shows that American conservative media functions very much like a closed system, with Fox News at the center<\/a> (at least until recently)<\/a>. The people who inhabit this system rarely collide with information beyond it, and the competition within it \u2014 on the supply side \u2014 is continually intensifying in order to meet the demand from audiences consumingthe high-stakes narratives. As Brian Stelter<\/a>, longtime media reporter and author of Hoax<\/em><\/a>, told me in November, anchors at Fox are now struggling \u201cto keep up with their viewers\u2019 demand for propaganda.\u201d”<\/p>\n\n\n\n …<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Consumers of this stuff have been fed a daily diet of conspiracies and panicked claims about the death of the republic and the plot to steal the election.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n …<\/p>\n\n\n\n “If you watch Newsmax and OAN every night, if you listen to talk radio hosts like Mark Levin<\/a> claim that \u201cOur Declaration of Independence and Constitution are being destroyed by the Democratic Party and the media,\u201d if you hear Sean Hannity<\/a> (whose show pulls in 4 million viewers a night) insist, \u201cWe have a duty to investigate every legitimate claim of fraud and abuse,\u201d if you\u2019re inhaling QAnon fantasies<\/a> online, you\u2019re likely extremely deluded about the state of the world. Is it any surprise that we\u2019re living in a golden age of conspiracy theories<\/a>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n The president himself is the most consequential consumer of this stuff. Listen to his leaked hour-long call<\/a> with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and you\u2019ll hear a hodgepodge of familiar conspiracy theories about hacked voting machines and forgeries and collusion among various election officials. It\u2019s all laid out and distilled, just as you\u2019d hear it on Newsmax or read on 4chan<\/a> or Parler<\/a>, the right-wing alternative to Twitter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n All these fictions have coursed through the conservative media ecosystem, and the insurrectionists who flooded the Capitol have imbibed it for months. It\u2019s why they chanted, \u201cStop the steal,\u201d<\/a> and it\u2019s why you can hear them saying<\/a>, \u201cThey don\u2019t get to steal it from us, they don\u2019t get to tell us we didn\u2019t see what we saw.\u201d And it\u2019s why something like 70 percent of Republicans<\/a> do not believe the 2020 election was free and fair.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So we reached this precipice because millions of Americans have had a firehose of falsehoods blasted into their brains for months on end. They believe the election was rigged and stolen. And they believe that because they\u2019ve been told exactly that, not just by the president but by a vast network of grifters and online provocateurs and political entrepreneurs who have cultivated and reinforced conspiracy theories about the election and god knows what else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And all of this is facilitated by social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, both of which, as Warzel<\/a> told me last year, pretend they\u2019re not \u201carbiters of truth\u201d and insist they \u201cdon\u2019t want to weigh in at all\u201d \u2014 but they\u2019re already in that position and have been for a long time. These tech companies may not be putting their thumbs on the scale in the conventional sense, but as Andrew Marantz, author of Antisocial<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>pointed out to me in a recent interview<\/a>, they\u2019re \u201coutsourcing those decisions to algorithms\u201d that continually push users into blackholes of mutually reinforcing content. Whatever their intentions, these companies helped lead us to this moment.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n …<\/p>\n\n\n\n “If you believed \u2014 I mean really believed \u2014 that the president you supported won a landslide victory that was systematically undermined by seditious Republicans and Democrats, and that that conspiracy was being covered up by a crooked and compromised media, and at the same time you saw over 100 Republican House members<\/a> and multiple senators<\/a> questioning the validity of the election, and the president was telling you to do something about it, it\u2019s not hard to see how quickly you might move from shitposting online to storming the Capitol.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n …<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Everyone who participates in this system of misinformation shares responsibility for what happened at the Capitol on Wednesday. We are reaping what they sowed. Still, Tucker Carlson<\/a> goes on Fox News primetime hours after a violent assault on the Capitol and, naturally, casts blame elsewhere: \u201cWe got to this sad, chaotic day for a reason. It is not your fault; it is their fault.\u201d”<\/p>\n\n\n\n …<\/p>\n\n\n\n “It was obvious when a man walked into a DC pizza shop<\/a> in 2017 with a gun because he believed a conspiracy theory about Hillary Clinton running a child sex ring. It was obvious when armed protesters occupied the Michigan Legislature<\/a> to protest Covid-19 lockdowns after an incendiary Trump tweet<\/a>.It was obvious when we learned the Nashville bombing suspect<\/a> reportedly believed in various conspiracy theories about aliens and lizard people. As this Wall Street Journal report<\/a> shows, it was obvious in recent weeks as various watchdog groups warned of growing threats online.And it\u2019s painfully obvious now after we saw the Capitol ravaged by rioters who believed, without any evidence, that an election had been stolen from them.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n …<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Every member of the Republican Party \u2014 from senators like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz to the toadies working in the Trump White House \u2014 bear special responsibility for this crisis. They\u2019ve known exactly who and what Trump is from the start, and they rode the tiger straight into the abyss.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And so many of them performed this ridiculous two-step, parroting Trump\u2019s nonsense in one breath and winking quietly while doing it. Even on Thursday, before the dust has settled at the Capitol, Republican House members<\/a> like Paul Gosar (AZ) and Matt Gaetz (FL) are spreading baseless conspiracy theories suggesting the assault was some kind of \u201cfalse flag\u201d perpetuated by antifa. And despite everything that happened in the past 48 hours, nearly 150 Republican lawmakers<\/a> formally objected to the election results anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If the fantasy-industrial complex churning out lies and conspiracy theories wasn\u2019t bad enough, we\u2019re also dealing with a much more pervasive problem in the press. As I tried to explain last year<\/a>, we\u2019re facing a new form of propaganda that wasn\u2019t really possible until the digital age, something known as \u201cflooding the zone with shit.\u201d It\u2019s less about perpetuating alternative realities and more about overwhelming the public with so many competing narratives, so much misinformation, that even well-intentioned people don\u2019t know what to believe.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n …<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Without some kind of reckoning in right-wing media,there is no sustainable path forward for the country. And even if the complicit pull back from the brink, it\u2019s probably too late anyway. So much of the damage is already done. The conspiracy theories that radicalized that mob are already out there, already implanted in millions of minds. Like some kind of political pathogen, they will keep working their will on the body politic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is our hell for the foreseeable future.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n