The Facts, Ma'am, just The Facts

 

Trump, despite or rather because he has made bullshitting a high art, retains his loyal following, a source of baffled amazement for many of us. The half of the country that is trying to capitalize on his steadily sinking credibility remains somewhat on the back foot, struggling to combat his unusual redefinition of how politics works. But some of those prominent figures who purport to break through the fog machine he quite adeptly creates actually mirror him instead.  

One of these unhelpful reactions is the now-familiar appeal to “The Science,” that plea to return to the realm of rationality, of respect for facts found somewhere other than a Redditt thread or under Alex Jones’s toupee. Trump destabilizes this anti-posture precisely because he’s a bullshitter, not (or as well as) a liar. He riffs; he puts together a narrative thread for his fans who can’t be dissuaded with contrary evidence because his version is more fun. As Harry Frankfurt famously explained in his classic essay “On Bullshit,” the liar “cares about the truth and attempts to hide it; the bullshitter doesn't care if what they say is true or false.” Frankfurt says the bullshitter’s goal is that the listener be persuaded, but in this case I think “vindicated, empowered, gratified, and entertained” is more accurate.

Trump doesn’t tussle over details but rather stories, over who has the more satisfying narrative. His opponents think they should win because their tales are more elegant and stick to traditional rules. As a result, Biden’s rebuttals and appeals to expertise sound buttoned-down and elitist—an immediate fail. Biden, like so many anti-Trumps, shows up to a wrestling match in a fencing suit. But he and the mainstream opposition to Trump are also peddling narrative.

Take the relentless, bogus talk about “the” science related to COVID—as if there were only one. Yes, there is a scientific approach, there is dispassionate examination of evidence, there is prudent restraint from wild assertions and wishful thinking—all of which Trump violates with deadly consequences.

But there is also nuance and doubt, and the pious reverence for “the” science emanating from Trump’s detractors supposes cozy uniformity of opinion about what we know at any moment and what we should then do as a result. That’s also fantasy thinking and a cuddly narrative that people have good reason to question.

The whiplash of changing assumptions and beliefs about SARS-CoV-2 pathogenesis, transmission, treatment, prophylaxis, and sequelae should serve as a caution against overconfidence, even for those capable of plowing through an article in JAMA. We know or think we know a few things, and we keep getting what we thought we knew updated or tossed out by new knowledge, which is as it should be. “The” science changes, so it’s not a “the.”

Furthermore, worship of "the science" encourages amnesia about how much science-sounding stuff has been massaged to death by our pharmaceutical narco-traffickers, resulting in mass over-medication (sometimes poisoning) of the populace. This entire field is plagued by publication bias, which is the tendency of companies desperately trying to find evidence that their drugs work only to publish study results that say so while suppressing all others. That means that a dozen studies that the public never sees might show that a medication is a turkey, but the drug companies can still publish two that make it look good and sail through the approval process. The result is all those TV ads we’re assaulted with daily that encourage people to rush to their docs and demand colored pills. And it’s all based on “the science.”

Aside from selective publication, there is built-in distortion in the whole system of clinical testing for the lucrative pharmaceutical industry. As Johann Hari tells this story in his book Lost Connections about antidepressants:

[Dr.] Peter [Kramer of Brown University] went to watch some clinical trials being conducted. It’s pretty difficult for [drug companies] to find anyone who will take part, so they often turn to quite desperate people, and they have to offer other things to tempt them. Peter watched as poor people were bused in from across the city to be offered a gorgeous buffet of care they’d never normally receive at home—therapy, a whole community of people who’d listen to them, a warm place to be during the day, medication, and money that could double their poverty-level income.

As he watched this, he was struck by something. The people who turn up at this center have a strong incentive to pretend to have any condition they happen to be studying there—and the for-profit companies conducting the clinical trials have a strong incentive to pretend to believe them. . . . Peter concluded that the results from clinical trials of antidepressants—all the data we have—are meaningless.

Trump drives a truck through scholarly inquiry, but it is a wall with serious structural weaknesses that the mass of citizens, exposed to those relentlessly manipulative drug ads, must intuitively see through. We all should have developed by now a strong suspicion that a lot of “the science” is a pile of crap.

Of course, Trump’s camp followers do excel at credulousness and willingness to swallow ever-taller tales. QAnon conspiracies (which I hope not to have to learn more about) fit the Trumpian worldview for their gamey hilarity and seem to encourage vigilante violence to boot. At the same time, when photos circulate of Bill Clinton, Trump, and other celebrities partying with Jeffrey Epstein, is it really crazy to believe in a secret cabal of powerful pedophiles? Granted, thinking that it operates from the back room of a pizza parlor rather than a private island in the Caribbean does merit at least one wackadoodle icon.

But do Trump’s detractors escape the cray-cray they find so appalling? Dismayed head-shaking about the gullibility of the great Unlettered pulsates from a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, which solemnly reports on a series of books on “disinformation,” “political warfare,” and “troll armies, junk news, and deceitful robots.” Author Jonathan Freedland laments that “our information supply is being deliberately, constantly, and severely contaminated.”

The “most vivid example” of this nefarious tendency, says Freedland, is “the intervention by Russian intelligence in the US presidential election of 2016, in which 126 million Americans saw Facebook material generated and paid for by the Kremlin.” This single sentence of Freedman’s contains two falsehoods, a striking performance in an article about the “contamination” of what the facts we’re being given.

It’s tiresome to have to re-debunk these pearls of contemporary liberal wisdom about how the evil Russkies destroyed Hillary, but here goes. The alleged 126 million Americans who “saw” the Russia-generated Facebook posts is an estimate based on a FB employee’s testimony to Congress in 2017 that that number may have been served one or more of the IRA stories at some time during the two-year period between 2015 and 2017. That means that while reviewing something like 23,000 pieces of content on your FB feed over 24 months, you might have seen one post (1, uno) that originated from the Russian commercial outfit at some point a year before the presidential election campaign began. Wow, we are Americans easily swayed! 

And what might that content have been? “The IRA’s most shared pre-election Facebook post was a cartoon of a gun-wielding Yosemite Sam.” Another featured an offer to “like” a photo of Jesus. But the entire blue-team universe indignant with Trump’s yahoo fans remains convinced that this inept campaign by a Moscow ad farm was actually Vlad the Great’s skillful scheme to shoehorn Donald Trump into the Oval Office. Slightly wacky, perhaps?

Yes, the Russian ad agency IRA spent around $75,000 to post this and other goofy click-bait material on social media while Hillary Clinton flushed a cool billion down the toilet instead of visiting the black areas of Detroit and Flint, Michigan, where voting participation rates dropped precipitously. But tsk tsk, everyone “just knows” that the Russians made Trump president, just like everyone else “just knows” Barack Obama is actually Kenyan.

Freedland also regurgitates that fact-free assumption that the Wikileaks publications of DNC emails were leaked via Russian hackers to Julian Assange. This conspiracy theory has been so thoroughly undermined by actual facts that it’s pointless to repeat them. Here’s one of a dozen of correctives, which those wedded to the Freedland worldview will carefully avoid since it smashes their comfy narrative to bits.

Freedland’s assertions are presented with supreme confidence and obviously passed fact-checker/proofreading review at perhaps New York’s premier journal of liberal sophistication. They are demonstrably false, but more fun than remembering that Hillary blew it because her campaign sucked.

More to the point, however, is Freedland’s defense of what one of his reviewed authors calls the “liberal epistemic order, or a political system that places its trust in essential custodians of factual authority.” These (essential! like essential workers!) custodians include “science, the academy, journalism, public administration, and the justice system.” And there we have it: Freedland just named all his friends and peers in the upper reaches of the intellectual elite and exposed his narrative for what it really is: a defense of his class. 

That is the Achilles heel of the drumbeat of sneering contempt for the unwashed yokels who buy into Trump’s three-ring circus: you are losers, they are saying, not smart enough to get where we are, the big guys with the big jobs. I have no doubt that Trump’s loyal fanbase hears Freedland loud and clear and can’t wait to give him and his A-list clique a big fat middle finger on Nov. 3.

If you wish to receive alerts of these posts, email me at tfrasca@yahoo.com

P.S. Freedland is a Guardian columnist who was instrumental in taking down Jeremy Corbyn with the Labour-is-antisemitic campaign. Once the damage was done, Freedland apologized for making a “very bad error” in falsely reporting that a Labour parliamentary candidate had been fined for making antisemitic remarks on Facebook. But that was just a mistake based on a tendentious, anonymous insider tip, not “contamination of our information supply.”