While it was welcome news to hear about the near $1 billion judgement against Alex Jones in the second trial, the damage, probably irreperable, has already been done to this nation. Everywhere are conspiracies for the conspiracy-minded to latch onto. The pandemic did not help matters. And neither, of course, did hustlers like Jones. From Aja Romano of Vox:
Jones has already lost all three cases by default judgment; the trials are about determining how much money he will pay the survivors. Plaintiffs sought $150 million in total damages — what might be deemed a reasonable amount given Jones could be making as much as double that in a given year — and many onlookers are viewing the trial as a major moment of reckoning for Jones.
But while Jones will finally be forced to pay, literally, for his actions, the lasting impact of his years of conspiracy-theory mongering may be impossible to quantify. The case’s shocking revelations, which now include a potential link to the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol, are reminders that the kind of zealous paranoid thinking Jones encourages can have dangerous and unintended consequences.
America, a nation formed against religious oppression, already has a paranoid style baked into its original recipe. “American politics has often been an arena for angry minds,” Richard Hofstadter wrote in 1963(!). “In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority.” To read the letters of the Founding Fathers, one sees constant reference to “Papist conspiracies,” and the like. Few nations are as prone to conspiracy mania as America. Hofstadter continues": “But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.” Ah, America …
Unscripted/ COURTESY OF PENGUIN PRESS
I am very much looking forward to Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy by two New York Times reporters — James B. Stewart and Rachel Abrams. “Pictured from left are Redstone’s girlfriend Manuela Herzer, former Viacom chief Philippe Dauman, Redstone’s grandson Brandon Korff, ex-Redstone girlfriend Sydney Holland, CBS chairman Les Moonves and Redstone’s daughter Shari Redstone, who currently serves as chairwoman of Paramount Global,” writes Seth Abramowitz in The Hollywood Reporter. The book goes on sale in February and will probably be chock filled on the sex life of the late Sumner Redstone (yuck), who died at 97, and the crazy succession battle immediately preceding his unscripted media exit.
Crisp October strengthens my wondering about the death rates from COVID with regards to political party. Clearly Republicans — or, Republic-friendly voters — were more against masking, public health mandates, vaxxing as well as being far more susceptible to believing in the latest QAnonsense. There is now a grim study available with even grimmer answers. “By cross-referencing voter registration data and mortality figures, the study found that ‘excess death rates’ — the number of deaths above pre-pandemic levels — for registered Republicans were significantly higher than for registered Democrats after the introduction of Covid-19 vaccines,” James Risen writes for The Intercept. “‘If these differences in vaccination by political party affiliation persist, then the higher excess death rate among Republicans is likely to continue through the subsequent stages of the COVID-19 pandemic,’ the study, which was published in September, concluded.” One wonders through a glass darkly if Joe Biden would have won the Presidency if Trump friendly voters, many older and with health issues to begin with, hadn’t died from disregarding public health warnings in favor of conspiracy thinking …
In brighter news: There are many things to admire about Margaret Sullivan, the former Public Editor at the New York Times. She is a journalist’s journalist — and by that I do not mean by way of the LA-NY-DC nexus of power and status. She just wrote the definitive piece for the Washington Post magazine about how to cover the next election, if Trump should run again. And she came from humble beginnings, which are often the best sorts of beginnings, working her way up from local papers in Western New York (The Niagara Gazette and The Buffalo News, where she helped diversify her hometown paper).
Sullivan regards journalism as a working class craft and has little desire to chase the elites for the sake of chasing status, unlike many of her colleagues. Those elites are, in many ways, the reason for why America is the way it is now, in full populist revolt. So, after the 2016 election, she searched the country for the reasons it is the way it is, which took her outside the beltway. Kathy Kiely writes in her glowing book review of Newsroom Confidential in the Washington Post:
Shortly after Trump’s inauguration, The Post’s media columnist did something that might surprise those who dismiss journalists as out-of-touch elites. Turning down invitations to speak in a slew of European capitals about what Trump’s election meant, she instead took up a reader’s challenge to get out of ‘your liberal bubble.’ Not that Sullivan really needed to: She grew up in Buffalo in the shadow of a hulking steel mill that, she writes, would turn skies ‘electric coral’ when the slag was dumped at night. Though her dad was a lawyer, the town’s blue-collar ethos clearly shaped Sullivan’s sensibility. She spent her formative years in a newsroom where she had to tolerate nicknames like ‘Marge’ and ‘Sully.’ One of her early mentors, the managing editor of the Buffalo paper, would evaluate stories by asking, ‘What would Sweeney think?’ Sweeney, Sullivan explains, was ‘an imaginary character … presumably a working-class guy sitting on his front porch in Irish Catholic South Buffalo, cracking open a Labatt Blue and picking up The Buffalo Evening News.’
Sullivan’s reporting tour of small towns in northwest Pennsylvania and western New York took her to places that should have felt familiar. She meandered into saloons packed with plenty of Sweeneys. Only now, they were telling her that the 9/11 attacks were arranged by the U.S. government, that the 2012 massacre of schoolchildren at Sandy Hook Elementary School never happened and that journalists who report otherwise ‘get paid to be wrong.’
Sullivan felt her world lurching off its axis.
This is the kind of education one gets from great but embattled print newspapers like the The Niagara Gazette (founded 1854) and The Buffalo News (founded 1873), where journalism is still a working class craft and informing the readers is the primary goal, not getting into the Bloomberg afterparty at the White House Correspondents Dinner (Averted Gaze).
Annie Liebowitz photographed a diverse group of the most influential female artists of our time, and the (newish) editor Radhika Jones is doing a fantastic job of rescuing Vanity Fair from the hollow archaic ruin that her predecessor left her. Its just amazing how much better as well as more diverse and inclusive Vanity Fair is now that Graydon Carter has evaporated. I don’t mourn the end of the centrality of magazines to the media business as a whole, but it is nice to see, for example, diversity OGs like The Guerilla Girls getting some Vanity Fair love. They would not have even been on an libertarian-Establishmentarian fool like Graydon Carter’s extremely limited radar.
Eric Levitz of Intelligencer does some serious heavy lifting with regards to Kanye West and the debate about whether or not there is a correlation between his antisemitism and his bipolar disorder (where, oftentimes, he goes off his meds and then does media appearances):
“It seems impossible to separate West’s decision to express disordered, antisemitic ravings from his issues. But whether his bigoted beliefs — and/or his attraction to controversy — derives from his mood disorder seems far less clear. There are plenty of bigoted billionaires who suffer from no mental-health issues. To attribute West’s hateful sentiments solely to his condition not only stigmatizes his fellow sufferers but also obscures the cultural wellsprings of antisemitism: If you place a paranoid, manic narcissist into a society bereft of antisemitic ideology, hatred of Jewish people will not magically emerge from their mood swings.
And yet I don’t think we can actually know that West’s bigotry has nothing to do with his illness. Disordered thoughts can sometimes gravitate toward paranoid, conspiratorial logic, and antisemitism is fundamentally a conspiracy theory. Furthermore, there is a long-running debate in the psychiatric community about whether extreme racism itself should be understood as a delusional disorder.
In any case, human beings in general do not need to be mentally ill to be antisemitic.”
Finally, there is the matter of Tucker Carlson’s Kanye interview. Earlier this week, VICE broke the story of what was actually too anti-Semitic to be actually included in the televised interview (which is difficult to imagine). But even without those edited clips, Kanye’s anti-Semitism was on full display to an audience of roughly three million viewers.
But then, that’s precisely the type of garbage human Tucker is. “While it is not surprising that Carlson did what he did, it does speak volumes about who he is,” writes Oliver Darcy of Reliable Sources. “Carlson could have at any point challenged or condemned West when he made the ugly comments. But instead he chose to use West as a vehicle for his own politics, deciding to shelve the newsworthy comments — and perhaps worst of all, vouch for West to his massive audience.” It is not the first time Carlson has vouched for despicable sentiments on his cable show. Carlson gave nearly an one hour to racist pseudoscientist Charles Murray.
Basta!