The pundits in the corporate media speak with indignant contempt of the conspiratorial culture in the United States, evidently ignorant of their own indispensable role in producing this atmosphere of paranoia. For as long as any living person can recall, the corporate media has served the ruling class by disseminating its mendacious messaging, by deliberately misinforming the peasantry. The arrangement has been supremely lucrative, and therefore agreeable, to the so-called journalists and editors of the mainstream press. Alas, like most of the devious schemes practiced to perfection by the neo-capitalists of the twentieth century, the marriage of media and state has begotten monstrous offspring, including a benighted electorate that seeks impractical solutions to problems that it does not understand. Continuously abused by the political establishment and the media that defends it, the electorate rejects the official narrative, promising to create, or accept, another.
The conspiracy theory is the electorate’s first attempt to free itself from the cerebral fetters that the corporate press has forced it within. Taught to assess and to reason incorrectly, the electorate now tries to teach itself wisdom. Predictably, it will make countless mistakes, some of them comically primitive, before it obtains understanding. The establishment searches obsessively for these errors and, once it has discovered them, accentuates them, and repeatedly reminds the other peasants of them, as if they were unconscionable crimes born of the most unforgivable sins. We are taught that the pursuit of intellectual freedom, irrespective of the pursuant’s intent, inevitably ends only in the crassest form of stupidity—and therefore, in the unerring wisdom of the establishment, to pursue is to be stupid.
In other words, to defy the establishment is to be stupid. The consequence of such a perspective is the discrediting, a priori, of quite literally all criticism of the establishment. Clearly, this outcome would be perfectly agreeable to the establishment, but it betrays, in its marked departure from the establishment’s purported principles pertaining to the freedom of expression, an insecurity on the part of the ruling class. Why does the ruling class suddenly believe it is necessary to use its many resources to stigmatize every criticism of its policies and to informally prohibit the establishment media from voicing that criticism, except to condemn it unambiguously? Such a procrustean policy suggests a bourgeoning concern that this criticism—or the skepticism that engenders it, at least—is spreading too rapidly. For decades, the establishment has labored to convince the peasants that the mainstream opinion invariably reflects the common opinion, but the intellectual intolerance of “the mainstream” raises uncomfortable questions about the definition, and the validity, of that most institutional term.
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