Abstract
This chapter turns to the events of January 6, 2021, when the Capitol was attacked by a group of conspiracy-minded Trump supporters who believed that the 2020 election of Joe Biden had been “rigged.” I examine this event as a case study in what is at stake if we continue to believe we are “worlds” apart. I also address how the decline of trust in traditional authoritative structures has helped spread conspiracy theories such as QAnon and Russiagate, illustrating that the American political class has been engaged in bad detective work, finding the solution before discovering the clues. After a brief discussion of V for Vendetta to outline the danger of the growing risk of nihilism, I conclude by turning to the topic of democracy, arguing that the same intersubjective matrix that underlies good detective work underlies a functioning democracy.
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Notes
- 1.
One note, I wish to address up front. Because I am dealing with major media institutions and a two-party system, I use terms “liberal,” “conservative,” “left,” and “right,” on a few occasions. I realize the terms are imprecise and unstable, but to explain differences between the intended audience for, say, MSNBC and FOX, the terms are useful; however, they should be understood only in the passing sense expressed in a sentence like “Viewers of Fox believe themselves to represent conservative values, seeing MSNBC viewers as elite liberals.”
- 2.
During a press conference on October 5, 2017, with senior military leaders and spouses, Trump said, “You guys know what this represents? Maybe it’s the calm before the storm.” As LaFrance writes,
Those 37 seconds of presidential ambiguity made headlines right away—relations with Iran had been tense in recent days—but they would also become foundational lire for eventual followers of Q. The president’s circular hand gesture is of particular interest to them. You may think he was motioning to the semicircle gathered around him, they say, but he was really drawing the letter Q in the air.
- 3.
While the Post continues to provide fact-checks of Biden, there is no database counting an official number (Swenson). Are we to assume that politicians before Trump and after do not lie, or do not lie enough for us to keep track? It is well worth remembering the lies told during the Bush administration, disseminated through reporting by Judith Miller and others led to hundreds of thousands of deaths. However, during the Trump administration, Bush was reimagined as a congenial, well-meaning guy. “Hey look, he’s painting!”
- 4.
I mean this in the sense that Chomsky and Herman as well as Taibbi lay out. I am not saying that the NYT does not still produce good journalism. I am saying that there was a shift in the coverage under Trump. This is dangerous, in my estimation, because while most of the liberal, educated class knows not to go to Fox News for serious discourse, they do pay attention to agenda setting media like the NYT and the Washington Post.
- 5.
It wasn’t exactly like they had no evidence for their conspiratorial beliefs. For example, imagine what the followers of the cult thought when it was revealed that someone like Jeffrey Epstein could exist in plain sight and that further, he was meeting with people like Bill Clinton and Bill Gates, two other favorite targets of QAnon conspiracy theories.
- 6.
Because I am discussing two political parties and their ability to get caught up in bad narratives, there may be a tendency to think I am trying to argue for a moral equivalency. I am not. Fox News is not the New York Times. In fact, I use the NY Times and Washington Post throughout this work and I am able to find excellent reporting in both. What I am saying is that both political parties are losing their ability to engage as partners in truth-discovery. While Fox News was born as a propaganda tool, if establishment media loses its ability to inform the class of readers it services, we will continue to believe we live in two Americas.
- 7.
This is not to say that all inquiries are equal. I do not want to suggest that QAnon and Russiagate are at the same level of absurdity. However, both show the problem when one is certain of the truth before they have evidence.
- 8.
Officer Brian Sicknick died that day. His death was originally reported as caused by a fire extinguisher being thrown, later hypothesized that it was caused by chemical irritants that were sprayed, and finally was ruled the result of a blood clot.
- 9.
This is not to say that all the rioters at the Capitol fell into this category. Some seriously nefarious characters carried zip-ties and seemed to have knowledge of the layout of the building. The event, like all contemporary events of this kind, was many things at once.
- 10.
Which sounds a lot like Wachowski’s arguing in The Matrix that most people do not want to know what is really going on, a premise that seems spurious when made by people on the cutting edge of special effect filmmaking.
- 11.
The term “content” in this usage can’t apply backward. Nobody would say “Bach produced content every week for his Church’s followers.” However, it now sounds perfectly natural to say one’s favorite artist “put out a lot of content last year.”
- 12.
This was the case with Trump, of course. Recently though, through email leaks we have seen that Anthony Fauci was not quite St. Anthony; Anthony Cuomo who was positioned as a foil to Trump turned out to be lying about nursing home deaths; and Bill Gates was plausibly meeting with Jeffrey Epstein for Epstein to help him get a Nobel Prize (Briquelet) (Taibbi) (Gold).
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Watson, D.R. (2021). The United States of V, White, and Q. In: Truth to Post-Truth in American Detective Fiction. Crime Files. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87074-4_7
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