Posted on 09/11/2021 8:59:29 PM PDT by nickcarraway
The breakdown of institutional legitimacy helped shape our current information crisis All governments lie and distort to advance their agendas. But it’s fair to regard the current moment as a singular age of unreality in recent United States politics. Most members of one party have embraced an explicitly fictional world, one in which the 2020 election was stolen by rampant election fraud by Democrats. Historian Timothy Snyder has called this fabricated conspiracy “the Big Lie.” The rise of such a flagrant mendacity is usually located very recently, in Donald Trump’s first election run or in the dawning of the social media age. But the inflection point was actually 20 years ago, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.
In Mother Jones, David Corn has argued that the George W. Bush administration paved the way for the Big Lie, on the grounds that its propaganda push that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction constituted its own “Big Lie.” More generally, one might think that the misinformation-filled campaign in the lead-up to the Iraq War was itself an early example of the “post-truth” era. Admittedly, its effects on the promotion of false beliefs were extreme. We focus so much today on the role of social media and digital disinformation when it comes to our fractured sense of reality and the rise of conspiratorial thinking. But it’s worth remembering that in September 2003—five months before a site called thefacebook.com went live—a Washington Post poll found that almost 70 percent of Americans thought that Saddam Hussein was at least somewhat likely to have been personally involved in the 9/11 attacks.
There is, however, a distinction between the distortions that the Bush-Cheney administration made in its rush to war and the “Big Lie” of Trump’s Republican Party. As historian Joseph Stieb argued correctly in the Washington Post, unlike the Bush administration’ propaganda, “Trump’s case for a stolen election isn’t exaggerated, it’s pure fiction.” In other words, the Bush administration attempted to deceive American citizens by distorting evidence and insinuating falsehoods. In intending to deceive, one treats one’s audience as reasoners whom one must persuade. In contrast, Trump and the party he controls simply made up, whole cloth, a fictional reality for its own loyal audience. Trump’s “Big Lie” was never intended to be digested by anyone other than unwavering supporters of the leader. A Big Lie isn’t part of an argument. A Big Lie is a rallying cry.
How, then, did the immediate post-9/11 era give rise to our current politics? Some of the most trusted Americans in public life, such as Colin Powell, were used to present wildly exaggerated and false claims to the public. Much of the mainstream media felt impelled to give far more credibility to the government’s justifications for the Iraq War than they warranted. When democratic institutions are revealed to have misled the public as badly as they did, what results in a crisis of legitimacy. In such a crisis, people look for a charismatic leader in whom they can place their faith. The failures of the Bush administration made Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party possible, because the success of Trump’s style of politics depends on a vast loss of public trust in government and the media.
It is not just the decline in public trust that paved the way for the flourishing of what can rightly be called fascist politics. After 9/11, Muslims were represented as an existential threat, domestically and internationally. Trump’s favorite government institution, ICE, is a product of the post-9/11 era. The logic of a militarized border, with a massive department of “Homeland Security” and a designated internal police force to protect “us” against “them,” is a legacy of that era. It’s no wonder that social platforms have exploited the rise of this in-group versus out-group mentality, attuning their algorithms to profit off of powerful emotional triggers such as fear, outrage and disgust.
Fascist politics thrives when democratic institutions can be painted as corrupt and untrustworthy. It thrives when a population is taught to fear a supposed enemy that is both foreign and yet insidiously domestic—be they Muslims, Jews (as in Nazi Germany) or another minority group. Social media and online influence operations provided platforms and fuel for conspiratorial thinking to proliferate. But it was the post-9/11 era, with its nativist anti-Muslim appeals, betrayals of public trust and failures of democratic institutions, that enabled a politics based on rallying cries and faith rather than mutual deliberation over policy. It laid the groundwork for the future success of politicians who prey on our fears and encourage conspiracy theories, if not manufacture them outright. This is how they push aside democracy in pursuit of absolute power.
This is an opinion and analysis article; the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
Science
I thought people on the left were at the forefront of 9/11 conspiracy theories - that Bush and Jewish people planned 9/11. I think they say that all Jews didn’t come into work on 9/11.
Asymettretric damage does not cause symmetric failure. Engineering 101.
Plus, all 3 towers fell at free fall speed...impossible.
Funny how the article skips over the 3 year Big Lie that Trump/Russian collusion stole the election from Hillary.
Watch the first episode of “The Lone Gunmen” from March 2001. It’s free on You Tube.
It’ll shock the ..... out of you!!!
Vote rigging: How to spot the tell-tale signs
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-37243190
https://www.steynonline.com/11347/caving-in
What gets me is that there is no footage from JFK or Boston of the terrorist boarding the planes. All we have is Mohamad Atta boarding a connecting flight in Maine. The other issue is the impossible finding of one of the terrorists passports in lower Manhattan.
I did simulations on this and the results were the same each time.
Seismic simulations on all three towers show them collapsing in a +6.8 event. They really weren’t that stout to begin with.
By comparison the Empire State Building would survive similar impacts. It can also be expected to perform well in a +7.4 seismic event.
This article from Scientific American is neither scientific nor American.
...Talk amongst yourselves.
Another thing is that the Pentagon still refuses to release any of their secuirty footage from 9/11. The reason they give is that it shows nothing and therefore would serve no purpose for the public to see.
Video surveillance in 2001 wasn’t as pervasive as it is today. These days it’s impossible to avoid.
The Pentagon also seized the video from a gas station across the street. That’s also classified.
Man will never fly in a thousand years; but we can spew pure unadulterated political crap. We need no science!
I know a guy that to this day says the planes were CIA holograms and Bush directed the whole thing.
All that does is piss me off and it’s a direct deflection of the islamics that actually did it.
I remember when SA was a respected journal. They should change it to Propagandist American.
Scientific American now marches with the forces of evil.
Neither scientific, nor American.
Typically, when the MSM writes about “conspiracy theories” they are just trying to disprove something that is real such as “Obama spying on Trump”, “Covid came from a lab,” or “The democrats stole the election.”
In the case of 9/11, their motives are pure, and they have no interest other than proving what is true.\s
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