Tonight the documentary Merchants of Doubt is playing at the Citizens Library (55 S. College St., Washington, PA 15301) from 6-8 pm sponsored by The HearYourselfThink Project. Everyone is welcome!
This is an accompanying “What’s on Your Mind” blog written by Dave Ninehouser from The HearYourselfThink Project:
On December 4th, 2016, a North Carolina man entered a Washington D.C. pizza restaurant called Comet Ping Pong brandishing a rifle. He pointed his gun at an employee and then fired off the weapon multiple times, thankfully, without hitting anyone. What compelled him to travel so far to take up arms in this particular pizzeria? He told police that he was on a mission to “self-investigate” a conspiracy theory purporting that a child sex ring, allegedly orchestrated by prominent Democrats, was being run from its basement — a basement that, as it turned out, Comet Ping Pong does not even have.
Who was behind spreading this politically motivated slime job, aka “Pizzagate?” Most conspicuously, Alex Jones, of course. The same internet scam artist responsible for exploiting the deaths of the children murdered in the Sandy Hook school shooting by using that real event as the jumping off point for his for-profit, conspiracy mongering enterprise, dedicated to stoking public paranoia and cynicism with fabricated assertions of “false flag” staged events and shadowy government skulduggery. Newtown parents, already living in personal hells of grief and loss, have faced years of harassment, abuse, and death threats resulting from Jones’ ghoulish hoaxing.
And that brings us to a year ago, October 27th, when a man took up a weapon of war against fellow Americans, killing eleven mostly elderly worshipers at Tree of Life Synagogue in Squirrel Hill, in Pittsburgh, PA, during morning services. The man, by his own account, did this because of conspiracy theories, accepted as fact, asserting that Jews were funding a caravan of murderous, alien invaders who were crossing the southern border to attack him and “his people.” This hoax was promulgated by (surprise!) Alex Jones, NRA-TV, and Fox News, amongst others.
Now let’s take a look much further back in time to November 2nd, 1938 — on that day an article was published in the once mighty, now defunct New York Tribune by trailblazer Dorothy Thompson. Thompson was the first American journalist ejected from Nazi Germany in 1934 for exposing Adolf Hitler, the exalted Führer, as a crass conman and a demagogue. By 1936 she was reaching tens of millions of Americans in print and as an NBC radio news correspondent. Thompson was one of the most sought after public speakers of her time as she continued her personal campaign against Nazism, and in 1939 Time declared her equal in national stature with Eleanor Roosevelt.
But back to that November 2nd, 1938 article of hers. It appeared just three days after Orson Welles and his CBS Mercury Radio Theater accidentally sparked a case of American mass hysteria with a radio play about slimy Martians invading New Jersey and using their deadly heat rays to spread total destruction. Welles had the clever idea of enhancing the drama and believability of the story by presenting it as an ongoing emergency news event with actors portraying reporters breaking into “regular programming” of dance music to deliver urgent bulletins about the invasion as it unfolded in real geographic locations. This little gimmick, carried out on the relatively new mass-medium of radio, worked too well for many listeners who fled their homes, jammed phone-lines and roadways, and helped spread the panic, second hand, to their friends and relations. Thompson was eager to give America a piece of her mind about the whole situation:
“All unwittingly Mr. Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater on the Air have made one of the most fascinating and important demonstrations of all time. They have proved that a few effective voices, accompanied by sound effects, can so convince masses of people of a totally unreasonable, completely fantastic proposition as to create nation-wide panic. They have demonstrated more potently than any argument, demonstrated beyond question of a doubt, the appalling dangers and enormous effectiveness of popular and theatrical demagoguery…They have proved how easy it is to start a mass delusion…They have uncovered the primeval fears lying under the thinnest surface of the so-called civilized man…the power of mass suggestion is the most potent force today…the political demagogue is more powerful than all the economic forces…radio must not be used to create mass prejudices and mass divisions and schisms, either by private individuals or by government or its agencies, or its officials, or its opponents…If people can be frightened out of their wits by mythical men from Mars, they can be frightened into fanaticism by the fear of Reds, or convinced that America is in the hands of sixty families, or aroused to revenge against any minority, or terrorized into subservience to leadership because of any imaginable menace.”
Thompson’s impassioned warning about the power of technologically advanced mass media to warp hearts and poison minds, and to make hoaxes and conspiracy insanity go viral, was penned eighty-one years ago, but it should shake us to our core in the moment we are living through now.
Mass suggestion is driving zealots and the unstable to murder innocent people based on pure fantasy. Theatrical political demagogues are using mass media to create schisms; to deepen and exploit existing divisions and prejudices. Primal fear has been weaponized as a means of gaining and holding political and economic power. Citizens are much too susceptible to reacting to media stimuli without taking time to reflect critically on the reasonableness of what they’re being asked to believe.
The news, though, is not all bad. Leonard Pozner lost his six-year-old boy in the Sandy Hook shooting and for years has been waging an uphill fight against conspiracy hoaxers. In June, he at last won a defamation case against the writer of a book that followed the Alex Jones line, claiming the massacre was faked. Jones himself is facing legal action from Pozner and other Sandy Hook parents and last month Jones lost another appeal.
Moreover, in September, a federal appeals court ruled that legal action against Fox News can proceed based on Fox’s egregious amplification of completely fabricated conspiracy hoaxes surrounding the death of Democratic staffer Seth Rich. The case is being brought by Rich’s parents. Similar to “Pizzagate,” lies were spread attempting to pin his murder, which police concluded was the result of a botched robbery, to the Democratic Party. The court ruled that the Riches “sufficiently pleaded extreme and outrageous conduct…We have no trouble concluding that – taking their allegations as true – the Riches plausibly alleged what amounted to a campaign of emotional torture.”
As citizens what can we do? Stand for truth and against the spread of lies. Unfortunately, some elected officials see participating in the spread of conspiracy hoaxes as effective politics. They need to hear from us when they do.
In 2015, candidate Trump appeared on Alex Jones’ show to praise him, saying: “You have an amazing reputation…I won’t let you down.” After he became President, the New Town school board and the daughter of the Sandy Hook elementary principal who was murdered in the massacre called on Trump to denounce Jones and his malicious hoaxes. To this moment, Trump has declined to do so.
I’ll let Dorothy Thompson have the last word: “Mr. Welles went all the politicians one better. He made the scare to end all scares, the menace to end menaces, the unreason to end unreason, the perfect demonstration that the danger is not from Mars but from the theatrical demagogue.”
Read Thompson’s full column here.
