BRIDGET PHETASY: We’re All Alex Jones Now.
There’s a famous joke that gets at where we suddenly find ourselves:
A JFK conspiracy theorist dies and goes to heaven. At the Pearly Gates, God greets him. “Welcome. You are permitted to ask me one question, which I will answer truthfully.”
The man asks, “Who really shot Kennedy?”
God replies, “Lee Harvey Oswald shot him from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. There were no accomplices. He acted alone.”
The man pauses. “Shit. This goes higher up than I thought.”
That’s the country now. Not just the guy in the joke—all of us, drowning in what I’d call X-Files politics: a shallow understanding of first principles, a deep distrust of every institution, and a general paranoia in which the lack of evidence is proof. “The truth is out there,” The X-Files promised. Except it isn’t. Increasingly, it feels like the truth is nowhere.
In fairness to the conspiracy-minded, most of this stuff has some basis in reality. There really was an island with a shrine where young girls were served up to the most powerful men in the world. The Boy Scouts really was full of pedos. There really are grooming gangs in the UK.
All the ugly truths escaped containment, and every conspiracy theorist could point at them and say see, we were right all along. Add to that the blatant “don’t believe your lying eyes” levels of propaganda that have occurred in the last decade. Racism is the real virus. Mostly peaceful protests. Russiagate. Very fine people on both sides. Politicians, institutions, and their media mouthpieces got caught lying enough times that “trust the science” became a punchline.
The Establishment collapsed. The Void opened, and it filled with half-truths.
The Kennedy analogy is apt; a fellow leftist assassinating JFK caused massive cognitive dissonance and paranoia among big government Democrats in the 1960s. That was one of the topics explored by James Piereson in his 2007 book, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution:
The distrust and suspicion of the national government that developed in the years after Kennedy’s death represented an especially important adjustment in approach by the reform movement. From Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson, including most especially John F. Kennedy, liberals expressed great faith in the capacity of the national government to carry out programs to improve the lives of a majority of Americans. The countless programs they promoted are ample testimony to that faith. Yet such a faith could not help but be undermined by accusations that elements of the national government might have engineered the assassination of a president and then conspired with prominent leaders to cover it up. It was perhaps not well understood that such accusations, when not backed up by hard facts and evidence, struck at the heart of the welfare state that liberals over the preceding generation had worked so hard and intelligently to construct. After all, one can hardly argue before a perceptive audience that the national government is so corrupt as to engineer the assassination of a president but at the same time sufficiently competent and trustworthy to administer the pensions and health care of the American people. This ambivalence about national power-that is, the idea that the government is at once deeply corrupt and potentially beneficent-entered into the mainstream of liberal thinking in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination. Such ambivalence compromised the case for the welfare state; indeed, it may have opened the way somewhat later for potent attacks on it from a conservative direction.
Or as Charles Cooke asked the left in 2016, “Herewith, an under-asked question for our friends on the progressive left: ‘Has Donald Trump’s remarkable rise done anything to change your mind as to the ideal strength of the State?’”
