Is the Label 'Conspiracy Theory' Used to Stifle Dissent?
The accuracy of media portrayals and their hidden agendas.
Photo by Monica Bourgeau on Unsplash
READ: In small-town Wisconsin, looking for the roots of the modern American conspiracy theory
Over the decades, the Birch conspiracy grew to encompass the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, public education, the United Nations, the civil rights movement, The Rockefeller Foundation, the space program, the COVID pandemic, the 2020 presidential election and climate-change activism. In short, things the Birchers don’t like.
By framersqool:
This is yet another example of the deployment of the term 'conspiracy theory' in a name-brand mass-media outlet to conflate any departure from The Accepted Version with delusional far-right nutjobs.
Just the wording of the headline alone betrays several blatant logical fallacies:
What and where exactly is 'small-town Wisconsin'?
According to (at least) Wikipedia:
"As of the 2020 Census, it had a population of 75,644, making it the sixth-most populous city in Wisconsin. Appleton is a part of the Fox Cities metropolitan area, the third-largest metro area in the state."
Years ago, I lived in Wisconsin and got to know people from large and small communities all over the state. I would have been at pains to find anyone who had ever lived, worked, or studied in Appleton who would have called it a small town. There are major industries and a sizeable campus of the University of Wisconsin. I'd challenge you to find anyone from there who would use the term 'small town' other than in the standard colloquial sense regarding gossip and folks knowing each other, as in, 'well, Appleton's a small town,' in much the same way even you have probably quipped that New York City is a small town.
Then there's the underlying logic of the phrase 'looking for the roots of the modern American conspiracy theory.'
In the English language, the definite article 'the' is generally meant to label a singular item of which there is only one.
So, is there only one 'American conspiracy theory'?
According to whom is there only one such thing, and according to whom is anyone 'conspiracy theory' a conspiracy theory at all?
Or is it, to paraphrase the AP article itself, just a term to mark (and ridicule) what AP's target audience doesn't like?
Are their readers each personally privy to what happened on Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963, or any underlying factual basis for any other events and phenomena named in the dismissively contemptuous list I quoted above in italics?
Or is AP's target audience simply reliably pre-indoctrinated to accept mainstream media's interpretations of reality in general at face value?
Do they predictably experience auto-responsive emotions to such undisguised ideological cues, whereby all that is required to be satisfied that a thing has been 'debunked' is that AP called it a conspiracy theory, and that's all they need to know?
Then there are the implicit straw-man/false-dichotomy techniques on display, both in the title of the piece and throughout its rather fact-starved text, given that an ideological cue like 'small-town Wisconsin' has already been duly read as a reductivist epithet and not an accurate or even meaningful description of a single location in Wisconsin's third-largest metropolitan area, the emotions required to take the remainder of the contents at face value have already been unleashed.
These emotions, having been industrially installed into millions of Americans by our laughably mediocre education system and our astonishingly lazy media industries, can then be relied on to keep readers convinced that an article barely even trying to conceal its sarcastic and mocking tone is, in fact, a piece of worthy journalism presenting them with facts (or close enough, which is a rather low bar these days....)
The false dichotomy element doesn't even need to be articulated: since Everyone Knows (see my item about the Steve Martin game show parody from SNL in 1987) that only far-right delusional Trump-supporter nutjobs don't believe The Official Version and, therefore, of course, believe The American Conspiracy Theory instead, and since small-town America is an object of ridicule anyway and nobody who lives there has the sense God gave associate professors, then having 'debunked' some conspiracy theory that is a conspiracy theory because AP says so, the article can then go on to ooze in vague references to things John Birchers don't like (any talk of 'climate change,' etc), and present them by mere inclusion as being factual, because AP thinks they are.
Unfortunately, though I wish this kind of gaslighting of a mass audience was exceptional, it isn't.
This particular item goes a little further in expressing its own structural biases than most by accusing a fringe right-wing social club of.... a conspiracy?
Or is that just the working theory here?
So, to address my own views on how powerful and pervasive the gaslighting, false dichotomies, straw men, and other appallingly lazy and thoughtless mindsets mainstream media traffics in really are, you're probably struggling with not jumping to the conclusion that since I have criticisms of an AP article about what they call right-wing conspiracy theorists, I must instead be in agreement with them (false dichotomy at its unapologetic best.)
Believe me, I live in the beating heart of Flyoverian MAGA nutjob country, in one of the only US states to maintain basically a permanent GOP majority across all its governing institutions, and I hear shit every day that is so ridiculous and groundless that it strains every bit of the etiquette my mom and dad taught me not to laugh in my very good neighbors' faces, every time I hear some of the idiotic Fox-sourced nonsense they claim to believe.
But living in a predominantly conservative region also allows me to recall all those years I lived in blue-state America and how preposterous a lot of the things those people fell for were, too.
Like the capacity to assume that this article on AP's front page today, for example, is genuine journalism, or even that the topic it covers, as a front-page Sunday-release item, is newsworthy at all.
READ MORE BY FRAMERSQOOL
Thoughts from an aging bachelor of no particular consequence who is in command of more opinions than facts (but occasionally the facts, or the lack thereof) and can make a thing seem worth writing about.
To try and answer the rhetorical question (which I didn't ask: the title of this post was chosen by my good man Clayton) of whether the term 'conspiracy theory' is meant to 'stifle dissent', I have to say, of course not. My own thesis about the term and its usages has for many years been that these two words strung together are little more than.... post-hypnotic suggestion.
One industry article I found on the topic of post-hypnotic suggestion explains:
"By implanting specific instructions during a hypnotic trance state, these suggestions continue to exert influence over an individual’s thoughts, emotions, and behaviors even after they emerge from this altered state of consciousness."
[ source: https://howtousehypnosis.com/posthypnotic-suggestions/ ]
In other words, the usage of the term in real-time in a news item or other form of media presentation is not meant to persuade anyone of anything that they had not already been pre-indoctrinated to accept on face value. In the case of an AP article about the sad dusty residue of a once-prominent right-wing organization now confined to a single nondescript location ('small-town Wisconsin'), the post-hypnotic suggestion has little to do with any presumptive relevance or even newsworthiness of the.... John Birch Society, whatever that ever actually was, or whoever actually once gave a rat's ass.
What is being set in motion in a pre-indoctrinated readership's collective mindset is not just one but as many as three post-hypnotic suggestions (or, what I term alternatively as 'ideological cues' so no one will accuse me of being a 'supporter' of hypnotherapy....)
Two of these are included in the very headline:
'Small-town Wisconsin', which both indicates and espouses a view that such a place is not even worthy of serious consideration,
and 'the American conspiracy theory', which rather insultingly suggests that there is only one, and that all you need to know about it is that Associated Press is already onto it, so you don't have to be.
These alone are two very broad presumptions, not particularly supported by any further inclusion of any actual, you know, factual evidence that either one of them is true. (Neither one is, but never mind.)
The third post-hypnotic ideological cue is a very subtle departure from the term 'conspiracy theory' itself (because you've already reliably accepted two other false premises...) in the quote I included in my own text: 'the Birch conspiracy.' Suggesting very broadly, once again absent any factual corroboration, that anybody who believes what AP has labeled 'conspiracy theory' is.... a conspirator themselves!
Look at what small-town Wisconsin is up to, still conspiring against The Official Version, after all these years. How sad, suggests our hypnotist-news-outlet, how pathetic, and yet... how dangerous: we mustn't let them get away with it by.... electing Donald Trump?
The only meaningful message in the entire article is little more than VOTE DEMOCRAT.
But since nakedly partisan campaign pitches are boring and tiresome and damn near everyone who intends to vote this November has already made up their minds anyway, the point of this exercise in post-hypnotic suggestion is to remind and comfort a securely predisposed readership that they are... on the right (left?) side of history. Or something.
But since this is really more in the realm of entertainment than of scrupulously factual journalism (remember that? I barely do...), and since there is no activity more governed by predisposed preferences than one's choices of entertainment products, the editors, publishers and (most crucially) advertisers behind AP's selections of items to display on their front page on a Sunday morning during an election year need never to have concerned themselves over trying to convince anyone of the veracity of the article's rather gratuitous claims, because the social-media stats they rely on in deciding what to publish and how to spin it had already informed them that this is the type of thing their hypnotized test subjects want to hear anyway.
Stifling dissent (whatever that even means) has little to do with it.
Giving a target audience what they have already shown they want is the whole point. They just need to be reminded, constantly, of what are the latest correct things to want. Once those urges have been installed, mostly by means of piss-poor public education and shit-stupid popular culture, they only require updating now and then.
Once again, Leonard Schapiro: '...the true purpose of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade, but to establish a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the least trace of unorthodox thought immediately reveals itself as a jarring dissonance....'
If anyone Out There never endeavors to learn anything further about the very scientific and thoroughly value-neutral process of producing and distributing propaganda, irrespective of its ideological contents, making the fullest sense of that quote will go a long way.
(Prior to the ellipsis, the beginning of the sentence was 'no one understood better than Stalin', in a book written over half a century ago entitled 'The Communist Party of the Soviet Union.' Comrade Stalin misunderstood a great many things, but one thing he was a standard-setter at, was how to make people too scared to be heard saying anything other than what they'd been told were the correct things to be heard saying. If one looks at the garbled incoherent nonsense the Soviet state under his rule was known to disseminate on a daily basis, hardly any of it squaring neatly into Marxist theory other than in the simplistic usage of silly slogans, one might conclude that a man first trained to be a priest understood how superstition works, and that beyond creating a new religion and appointing himself as its Godhead, ideology itself was mere content-filler of no real meaning at all.)