#PizzaGate: On Expertise, Truth, and Other Quaint Notions

It was only a matter of time before a can't-miss news story broke that incorporated three of my perennial obsessions: pizza, politics, and post-fact epistemology*. 

(*Refresher: epistemology refers to the study of knowledge and how we know what we know. The term "post-fact" has resurfaced in the mainstream recently as an attempt to understand how the United States could elect** as president a man who not only lies, but who lies so routinely and so vociferously that we have had to come up with new categories of truth just to keep track of his bullshit.) 

[**Yes, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2.9 million votes, but she lost the election by 74 electoral college votes. She won it, that is, if the New York Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune, CNN, NPR, and many other major news outlets, journalists, and experts—even Fox News!— are to be believed. And that's precisely the question at the heart of this post: are they?]

Just before Thanksgiving, I got into one of those unfortunate Facebook skirmishes one has from time to time with one of my crabbier conservative in-laws. In response to an article I posted from the UK's left-leaning newspaper The Guardian detailing how Donald Trump's tax plan would overwhelmingly benefit the wealthiest Americans—the very 1%-ers with whom the Orange Turd is now feverishly stocking his cabinet—she replied, "Are these the same experts who said he had a snowball's chance [in hell] of winning?"

Someone gave me a copy of Doom for Xmas, so this is how everything in my world looks right now.

Indeed, many experts from across the political spectrum did predict a Clinton victory on November 8th, from FiveThirtyEight's David Wasserman to Republican strategist Frank Luntz, who as late as 6:43pm (EST) on Election Day took to Twitter to double down on his prediction of a Clinton White House. 

[Sigh.] In Nate Silver we trust(ed). 

So, in a certain sense, my crabby conservative in-law was correct: many so-called "experts" were dead wrong in predicting that Trump would be soundly thumped and sent back to his midtown Manhattan penthouse sobbing into a taco bowl.  

Leaving aside the larger epistemological question of whether human affairs like elections and Super Bowls can ever truly be predicted with any more accuracy than a flip of the proverbial coin (that is, 50/50), the distrust of experts and the media that seemed to emerge re-empowered from the bowels of the 2016 Presidential race has exposed some rather interesting features in the topography of contemporary knowledge. Let me briefly sketch out an example. 

By now you've surely heard of "#PizzaGate," the utterly bizarre story from November and early-December 2016 that told of a rifle-toting redneck from North Carolina, the bored antics of unemployed deplorables and other Trump supporters on Reddit and 4chan, and a supposed child-sex parlor operated clandestinely beneath an upscale Washington, DC-area pizzeria and frequented by such Democratic Party elites as top Clinton insider John Podesta. 

Yup, you read the previous run-on sentence correctly. This is the world we now inhabit. 

According to some of the more outlandish versions of this story, the underground (literally) child sex ring was headed up by none other than Hillary Clinton herself. Enough people believed this nonsense that Clinton was prompted to respond to the fake news phenomenon just one month after the election, calling it an "epidemic" with "real-world consequences."

Just in case it needs to be said, none of this stuff is true. None of it. Every last shred of "evidence"— the videos! the sex dungeons! the kill rooms! the secret codes!—all of it was fabricated and disseminated in online spaces, spun whole-cloth from the real Clinton-Podesta emails released by Wikileaks just days after the election.  

By now the many nuts and bolts of this story have been tread and retread by virtually every major news outlet in the US (you know it's newsworthy when SPIN gets in on the action), including this helpful, claim-by-claim breakdown from our friends at the New York Times and this report from the always-intrepid bullshit busters at Snopes.com. So I'm frankly less concerned in this post with breaking down the timeline and the "facts," such as they are or appear to be.

I'm more interested in the conditions of possibility that make such a story possible in the first place. What kind of culture, in other words, do we inhabit that makes an abominable fabrication like #PizzaGate possible and totally believable to so many people? Is the resurgence of "fake news" and "post-truth" a response to Trump, an effect of Trump, or something else altogether?

Here's what I really want to know (I think). To what extent (and in what ways) is the recent visibility of fake news connected to the conservative backlash against experts, elites, the media, even stuff like data, research, and experience?      

Maybe it will help to establish a few facts of our own. Folks all over the political spectrum are susceptible to the wiles of fake news. But some recent studies suggest that the narratives spun by fake news are more often targeted to—and successful among—conservatives and Trump-backers in particular, including two recent forays by PC World and NPR. Just before Thanksgiving, the latter went so far as to track down a successful fake news purveyor in his leafy suburban neighborhood. Here's what he had to say on the partisanship of his own fake news sites:

(c) 2016 Laura Sydell, All Things Considered 11/22/2016. NPR.org.

Then again, it sort of depends on what you call "fake news." Liberals and lefties lap it up, too, it turns out, but for a different purpose: entertainment. Think about the proud tradition of political satire from Juvenal and Jonathan Swift to John Stewart. Or what about Stephen Colbert's former brilliance on The Colbert Report? Sure these are examples of "fake news," but where do they fall on the spectrum when weighed against the likes of #PizzaGate? People on the left aren't warming up their Priuses and driving to Trump Tower to protest Trump's selection of El Chapo to head the DEA.   

Andy Borowitz of The Borowitz Report churns out screamingly satirical fake news stories every day for The New Yorker, a staunchly liberal, mainstream publication if there ever was one. But it seems difficult to imagine anyone believing that Putin is really slated to sing at Trump's Inauguration, no matter how many A-listers have already turned down the President-elect's offers to perform. 

And while people do get duped by The Onion from time to time, in the case of fake news and the 2016 Presidential election, the stakes were obviously much, much higher and the number of Americans fooled far greater.  

Fake news is nothing new, but the feeling of fragmentation that attends the digital age and the fact that many of us spend great swaths of time enmeshed in social media provide a fertile ground for fake news to spread like a virulent pandemic. Nearly two-thirds of adult Americans (65%) use social media, mostly while at work, according to a ten-year, carefully-researched statistical study by the Pew Research Center. 

Another reason for the re-ascension of fake news may be the fact that sociologists and pollsters (more experts) have charted a sharp decline in Americans' trust in all types of institutions over the last fifty or so years, whether political, social, cultural, or even (gasp!) religious in nature.

Obviously, I'm still knee-deep in trying to think this stuff through, and I need to jet so I can get in a run while it's 45 degrees and sunny in Indianapolis. (Yeah, climate change isn't a thing.) So, I'll let this simmer, see if I can get Josh to post something relatively apolitical about homebrewing, and come back to it in a few days when I've had a chance to think more about the role of narrative in the dissemination of fake news. 

In the meantime, check out The Diane Rehm Show's excellent roundtable discussion with journalists and researchers (even more experts!) on the role of fake news and online filter bubbles in the 2016 election and this terrific list of fake news sites from all over the political spectrum (but mostly conservative and anti-Clinton in nature) posted by Melissa Zimdars, a college professor at Merrimack College in Massachusetts. 

Pfffft. College professors. What do they know?