Media rabbit holes
Pizzagate tells us self-government cannot function without loyalty to the truth.
You’ve heard the story, right? A popular family pizza joint in Northwest Washington called Comet Ping Pong is actually a front for a child-abuse ring run by Hillary Clinton and her campaign chairman, John Podesta, who lives nearby. Oh, and the businesses in the same strip center, including the venerable Politics and Prose bookstore and another pizza joint run by an immigrant Egyptian family, are in on the child sextrafficking ring, as well; they’re connected by tunnels underneath the buildings, you see, as is a French restaurant across Connecticut Avenue from Comet Ping Pong. Oh, and the word “pizza” on takeout orders is code for “child.”
The story has been shared millions of times by Donald Trump supporters on social media. It’s so “believable” that those millions surely must have shared the impulse of a 28-year-old North Carolinian named Edgar Maddison Welch, even if they didn’t act on it. Last Sunday, Welch drove to D.C., where he burst into the pizza place armed with a Colt AR-15 assault rifle, a .38-caliber Colt revolver and a folding knife. The father of two young girls was there to “self-investigate” the underground tunnels and hidden rooms, the sex workers busily transporting kids to eager buyers.
Welch chased out customers and employees, poked around the premises for about 45 minutes and fired two or three shots before surrendering peacefully to police. No one was hurt.
In addition to families with children eating a late lunch, we’re surprised he didn’t find another little girl — Lewis Carroll’s fictional Alice, who’s had some experience tumbling down a rabbit hole into a bizarre and unsettling netherworld. We seem to be tumbling with her.
We’ve always had crackpots, paranoiacs, conspiracy nuts and, like Welch, the pathetically gullible, but never, ever, have they been so close to positions of power and influence in the nation’s capital and elsewhere. The presidentelect himself has long been a fervid conspiracist — Ted Cruz’s dad was in on the JFK assassination — and now, people he’s appointing to high positions share his predilections. They include Gen. Michael T. Flynn, Trump’s pick to be the White House national security adviser, who has spread similar nefarious nonsense about Clinton, as has his son, who, earlier this week, was relieved of his vague duties in the Trump transition for re-tweeting the pizza shop nonsense.
As you might have guessed, there’s a Texas connection to all this craziness. Alex Jones, an Austin radio talk-show host and a veritable conspiracy fiend who’s had Trump on his show, has been fiendishly spreading the pizzagate nonsense. Meanwhile, Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, still angling, we assume, to be Trump’s ag commissioner, has turned his website into consipracy-theory central, the more outlandish the better. He’s not a news organization, he told the Texas Tribune, so he shouldn’t be held to the same high standard.
Except for the immigrant-run pizza place up the street from Comet Ping Pong, which may be forced out of business by the ongoing harassment, and Politics and Prose, which was still getting up to 150 hate calls a day toward the end of the week, the pizzagate nonsense may be dying down. The issue itself, though, is very much with us.
Unfortunately, solutions are not readily apparent. We respect the rights of free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment; we also respect the rights of individuals to be outrageous. And yet, something more insidious is going on when fake news is fodder not only for the unhinged but also for the fanatics among us who have lost all perspective and the cynical who would exploit their fanaticism.
Ideally, Trump, Miller and other elected officials would forthrightly repudiate fake news and the spread of scurrilous information, although we’re not terribly confident such statements will be forthcoming. Beyond the politicians, we expect Google, Facebook and other social media outlets, given their unprecedented capacity to spread lies, to find ways of better policing their sites. We’d like to see classes in media literacy for high-school students and even younger, since we’re all still learning about the brave new media world aborning. (Our kids could probably teach those classes.) And, we all could renew our commitment to consider the source of news we find compelling.
The Founders recognized that a government of, by and for the people relies on an informed citizenry, thus their guarantees of a free press. These many years later the “press” has wildly proliferated in ways Franklin, Jefferson, Washington and friends would have found bewildering (as do we). What hasn’t changed since their day is loyalty to the truth, without which self-government cannot function.