Essay | Trusting government

||| FROM ROBERT AUSTIN |||

I found myself thinking recently of three Orcas men I know, long-time residents, all of them white and in their 70s. One is a pretty far left liberal, another doesn’t identify with or relate to politics and never votes, and the third is about as hardcore and stereotypical a conservative as you could imagine.

The liberal—let’s call him “Mick“ told me he doesn’t trust the Government because the CIA assassinated people in the 1950s and 60s. He’s convinced that JFK was killed by the CIA. He also said he doesn’t trust the Israelis because of their attack on the USS Liberty spy ship during the 1967 Six Day war. I recently fell prey to one of his trolling emails, and mentioned the role of Hamas in starting the current conflagration between Israel and Gaza. His response was “That’s a rather shallow, and grossly inaccurate assertion, one no doubt rooted in having listened to too much mainstream news. Though listening to MSNBC and the NYTs will tell you differently, Hamas are not the terrorists in this picture– the U.S., Gr. Britain, Israel, and the few western colonialist powers that back them are.”

I did manage to set him off again last year by referring to myself as a “centrist” who detested the current partisan nature of public discourse, which he interpreted as my being wishy-washy. He most likely did vote… for Jill Stein or RFK Jr.

The one who doesn’t identify—let’s call him “Will”—inherited a lot of money and hasn’t had to work for a living. Instead, he’s been holed up here (alone) for upwards of 20 years, working on elaborating and decoding a numerological scheme that came to him during a mushroom trip. He told me that he doesn’t trust the New York Times because of their then-journalist Judith Miller’s connection with Scooter Libby during the Bush administration. His aversion extends to the extent that he would not read a piece about a musician of mutual interest that I sent him a few months ago from the Times. Everything they publish are lies. He hates the US Government, and his favorite news sources—last I checked—were the Russian propaganda site RT.com, and zerohedge.com, which is run by someone in Eastern Europe. He’s been waiting for our entire system to come crashing down for as long as I’ve known him.

The hardcore conservative—let’s call him “Larry“ has exposed me to a lot of “alternative” sources that I would not have encountered otherwise. I used to try to humor him; for example when he said a few years ago that I should use Infowars.com as a news source, I replied that I used to check it when I wanted to know what the military and aliens were doing together in underground bases. He has internalized the gamut of stock right-wing ideas: electric vehicles are dangerous, they can catch fire and are worse for the environment than gas engines. Climate change is a hoax. mRNA vaccines like our main COVID vaccines were foisted on us as illegal medical experiments, in the name of Big Pharma profits. Vaccinated people shed trillions of spike proteins that infect those around them. Instead, he took and is probably still taking the horse de-wormer drug Ivermectin, reliably recommended by “alternative” health practitioners and doctors from whom you could also buy the stuff. When he started sending youtube videos of some guy stating that viruses had never actually been isolated or studied… I sent him a link to an online textbook about virology… and as always, never heard back with a counter-argument, until the next nonsensical anti-vax arrived.

What these three have in common is a complete distrust of our government and its institutions (the “deep state”); politicians; normal media channels, and even our medical establishment and the very concepts of what science and our accumulated expertise has to offer. They all accept alternative sources of information, ranging from Democracy Now to Russian Times to America’s Frontline Doctors. All three are completely convinced that their beliefs are identical to reality, and are unwilling to engage in any sort of dialog or conversation that involves the introduction of information contrary to their closely held world views.

What troubles me the most, though, is that the Venn diagram of how their worldviews overlap is so large, and centered on mis- and dis-information, conspiracies, distrust of science and expertise in general. And the idea that our government—the “system”—is corrupt and must be destroyed. None have suggested what the alternative should be.

The consensus of what is “true” has broken down, and our shared sense of what is “reality” in our rapidly complexifying world has been cast adrift in the Sargasso Sea of crazy that has become our current national “informational” habitat.

How can we best thread our way out of this unwelcome maze of memes and misinformation?