Those Scary Three Rs

Blog Song for the Moment

Don McLean, Everybody Loves Me, Baby (American Pie, 1971).

Heard Jack Lessenberry's commentary last week about opposition in the Michigan State Legislature to adopting the Common Core.  He called this opposition, to my surprise, the "lunatic fringe."  Lessenberry's a pretty moderate guy, so for him to label it this way was strong stuff.

What's the Common Core?  Basically, it's what they, way back when, used to call the "Three Rs." Reading, 'riting, and 'rithametic.  According to the Common Core website,

The Common Core State Standards Initiative is a state-led effort that established a single set of clear educational standards for kindergarten through 12th grade in English language arts and mathematics that states voluntarily adopt. The standards are designed to ensure that students graduating from high school are prepared to enter credit bearing entry courses in two or four year college programs or enter the workforce. The standards are clear and concise to ensure that parents, teachers, and students have a clear understanding of the expectations in reading, writing, speaking and listening, language and mathematics in school.

In other words, this is a pretty conventional attempt to assure that high school students are better prepared to enter the workforce or higher education.  The standards try to ensure, given the now wild mobility of Americans, and that some states were cheating on their report cards, that college admission officers and employers across the country can have some sort of solid expectation of what a high school diploma actually means.  It's also an effort to make the US education system more competitive in the global arena.

But this Common Core has run into the localism that has long prevailed in US education.  Michigan adopted it back in 2010, but renewal of its funding comes up in August.  A Republican faction in Michigan opposes that, and a Tea Party Republican on the Michigan House Education Committee, Tom McMillin, took the lead, slipping some lines into the budget bill that erase funding for Common Core initiatives.

In an op-ed, McMillin presents the Core--what some right-wing wits are calling "obamacore"--as a federal takeover of education, an opportunity for the Feds to steal student data, but what really has pissed him off was the lack of transparency around the development of the Core.  At the Statehouse hearings, he badgered  Department of Education officials, repeatedly asking about the process by which the Common Core was adopted, to such an extent that a chair, a fellow Republican Tim Kelly, cut him off.

After the hearing, Kelly said it was "unfortunate when you have some members that aren't listening to the answers that are beingprovided. You may not like the answer, but that doesn't mean you keep repeating the question."

Other legislators (both Republican and Democrat) wondered whether the federal government would use Common Core implementation to gather data on individual students.  There are more hysterical critiques out there, too.  Predictably,  Glenn Beck has labeled it "an extreme leftist ideology," connecting the dots of Obama, Common Core, and a retinal scan kerfuffle in a Florida school district.

It's odd that McMillin focuses on the process rather than the content of the Common Core.  No questions about whether the Core will improve educational outcomes, just veiled unsupported accusations that the Michigan officials lied about public input in the development of the standards, and that they represent a massive federal intrusion in local governance.  He bases his argument on two members of the Common Core Validation Committee who refused to sign off on the final version, neglecting to mention that there were 27 other members who did sign off, along with a bipartisan executive committee of six governors and four state superintendents.  This is a very centrist, technocratic policy proposal that only in feverish minds constitutes a left-wing conspiracy.

But there are good reasons to question the Common Core.  It is a top-down effort, orchestrated by governors, top education officials, academics, and funded by an array of organizations, from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the NEA to the Aspen Institute and the New American Foundation.  So I suppose one could dismiss the Core as yet another elitist effort that is not in touch with the daily grind of education.  In other words, how capable are school districts of implementing the Core, and will it ameliorate or exacerbate the growing inequality in our country's educational system?  Also, The No Child Left Behind Act has already incentivized 'teaching to the test,' and will the Common Core standards turn into goals that teachers end up mechanistically trying to realize?

As well, the Obama administration made a political mistake, I believe, in contributing funds to the Common Core initiative, and in compelling states bidding for "Race to the Top" education grants.

But, heck, I'm just sniping here.  There is faction of Americans that will criticize the Obama administration for whatever it does, and I'm glad some people with expertise and money have tried to do what so many local school boards have failed to do--raise the bar on education outcomes.

Postscript to Minor Rant on Conspiracy Theories

Blog Song for the Moment

Angelo Badalamenti, "Dance of the Dream Man," Twin Peaks (1990)

Perhaps some of the few who read this blog may wonder why I often have a knee-jerk reaction to conspiracy theories of this sort, and why I rarely can keep my satirical scorn in check.  I have been asking that of myself today, and I think I've boiled the answer down to these points.

1) A significant part of my occupation and vocation is research and writing (though I've done more of the former than the latter), as well as passing on my learning about research methods and writing to students.  The conspiracy theories that get passed on to my Facebook page, or that I run across while wandering through the web, violate the rules of evidence and logic that govern my work  (admittedly, not always successfully).  Anecdotal evidence is not sufficient; nor are generalizations from an individual experience.  Claims about this or that should be based on two or more sources.  Sources should be read with their origins and context in mind (not only who produced it, but for what, under what circumstances, for what audience, etc.).  So theories about things such as President Obama's origins, or his intentions, that are based on evidence ripped out of context, or are based on syllogistic logic, won't get the time of day from me.  Actually, I consider them an effrontery.  Fear-mongering without merit.  Hence my mild outrage.

2) An idiosyncratic reason: I immediately discount any conspiracy theory that I've noticed before in the history of our country, e.g., dangerous, diseased, immoral immigrants; a non-Christian fifth column in the country (Catholics, communists, Muslims); the US succumbing to some other power, whether a secretive elite, those Rothschilds, the Trilateral Commission, or the UN.

3) Another idiosyncratic reason: I also tend to dismiss claims made by pundits or bloggers who affix "Dr." before their name, often a PhD not related to their topic at hand, a sign of intellectual insecurity to me, and an effort to legitimize otherwise shoddy reporting and investigation.

4) But more important, these conspiracy theories distract us from real problems and challenges at hand. Think of all the intellectual energy spent on them rather than current issues such as balancing civil liberties with national security (Congress just renewed the Executive's foreign surveillance powers), or assuring long-term economic stability while addressing grievous economic stress in the here and now (the "fiscal cliff"), or reconciling the claims of marginalized groups with the values of the majority (e.g. gay rights).

All that said, it's not just been President Obama's race that has encouraged them (though clearly many of the theories about him share the premise that he's not one of us, not a part of "real America" as Sarah Palin put it).  There have been small cabals of the powerful that have done measurable damage to our polity, economy, and foreign affairs--I'm thinking Vietnam, Watergate, the Savings and Loan crisis, the Iran-Contra affair, the Enron debacle, as well as the 2003 invasion of Iraq.  I imagine some think, well, if that can happen, why not this more grandiose "X" conspiracy theory?  The difference is, though, these were ill-advised or ill-intentioned policy choices, ones challenged rather quickly, though not ameliorated very well at all.

And finally, I realize that there are left-wing conspiracy theories, too, that are equally specious. Off the top of my head--Oliver Stone's JFK assassination as attempted military coup (JFK), the US empire engineers everything bad in the world (e.g., Empire's Workshop), to the alleged sympathy of the Bush II administration towards right-wing Christians advocating theocracy (here, for example).

So, professor that I am, I'm asking those who repeat conspiracy theories--please do your homework.

MoJo's summary of Obama conspiracy theories

Blog Song for the Moment

Tom Waits, What's He Building in There?  Mule Variations (1999)

A couple of months ago, Mother Jones created a venn diagram summarizing all the wingnut conspiracy theories about Obama (below, or you can access the original article here)
 
My favorite: President Obama is actually a "lizard overlord" (just can't believe people buy this--clearly, he's an aardvark).

MJ could have added the viral rumor that the Obama administration handed China "eminent domain" rights in the US as collateral for debt owned by China (another one that's obviously untrue--the evidence is that all the Chinese restaurants are actually the collateral).

Or there's the one about Obama's intentions to give up US sovereignty to the UN (intentions?  It's already happened folks!  We're already duped!  That's the power of Obama.  Don't look into his eyes the next time you see him on TV unless you've covered your head with foil.)

TWINKIES! Our hope and our despair...

In awe of the many syllogistic paroxysms I've heard and read since the re-election of President Obama, here's my paean to the genre:

The Twinkie was born in 1930--THE SAME YEAR THE NAZIS CAME IN SECOND PLACE IN GERMAN NATIONAL ELECTIONS!  The same year the world was reeling from the '29 crash and the Great Depression.

Now get this.  The Twinkie died in 2012--THE SAME YEAR OBAMA WON REELECTION TO THE PRESIDENCY!  The same year the world is still recovering from the 2008 Great Recession.  It's clear, we're about to fall under nationalist socialist rule.  And the fact that so many Blacks and Latinos voted for a redistributive candidate means the commie Chinese are not far behind.

Folks, we are doomed unless we can revive Twinkies.  We are doomed unless our allies in Congress can show that the lack of available Twinkies led to the breakdown of intelligence that permitted the Benghazi attack.  We are doomed unless our allies in Congress show that it was lack of Hostess products that led General Petraeus into infidelity and Ambassador Susan Rice into what we Twinkie-loving people suspect is a Watergate-level affair.

And we all know that Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have been stockpiling Twinkies, Ding-Dongs, and Ho-Hos, for years, damn them (fortunately, Colombia has enough Ring-Dings, for now, to hopefully deter the neighboring narco-terrorists).

Speaking of narco-terrorists, I can't seem to find the stash of vicodin that I carefully placed with my last Twinkies.  No doubt Obamacare's to blame. . .along with all those unknown "dozens of black people" that voted in Maine, or maybe it's those 78-80 communists Florida Congressman Allen West has identified as serving alongside him.  Obama won re-election.  My feet are swollen.  Must be a connection...

Who Gets to be an American?

Apparently, President Obama doesn't. Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio and other "Birthers" continue to spin conspiracy theories while more reputable figures like John Sununu say things like "I wish this President would learn how to be an American."

I thought things got strange back in the early eighties with Maranatha preachers casting out demons in the Oregon State quad and young Reaganites outnumbering liberals in the cast of Gershwin and Kaufmann's political musical "Of Thee I Sing" (a theater crowd combined with a campus setting, and you'd think there would have been more of us that thought the Reagan administration's declaration that ketchup and pickles are vegetables hilariously awful. . .).  And then there was Howard "I'm-Mad-As-Hell" Jarvis turning anti-tax hysteria into virtue, and President Reagan sunnily declaring "America is back, standing tall," to wild applause and gushing commentary, after illegally mining Nicaraguan waters and sending the troops to crush tiny Grenada.

The strangeness then doesn't compare to that of the present.  It seems the combination of economic hard times and the election of our first black president have released our inner looniness.  And while race was obviously an issue a generation ago (remember all the talk of the GOP capturing disaffected white Democrats?), it appears that Du Bois' "problem of the Twentieth Century" remains with us in the Twenty-First, though it bubbles to the surface in different ways.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio, birther extraordinaire
Matt York/AP

Now, no doubt Arpaio is in part engaged in some tit-for-tat.  He's under federal indictment for racial profiling of Latinos in his campaign against undocumented immigration.  So he once again hauls out the tired accusation that Obama is not really an American and therefore not our legitimate President.  I suppose we could see Arapio as just keeping up an old American tradition of nativism that has been around since Ben Franklin's whine back in 1751 about all those "alien" and "swarthy" Germans (I've been called many things, but I don't think "swarthy" was one of them).

But we can also consider this in the context of a broader effort to restrict the number of people entitled to be American: the anti-immigrant and so-called "self-deportation" legislation in states such as Arizona and Alabama, or new voter photo ID laws  in ten states that make it more difficult for poorer and otherwise marginalized citizens to vote, or even register to vote.  I could even mention the Obama administration's decision to justify the execution of American citizens deemed guilty of terrorism, without due process of law.

I'd say our country is in the middle of an existential morass in which we have tremendous disagreements over how we identify Americans, who gets to be an American, and what being an American really means under the law.

Former NH Governor and Romney ally, John Sununu
Denis Poroy/AP

So it's no surprise that John Sununu, instead of sticking to a critique of Obama administration policies, resorted to a complaint about the president's lack of Americanness.  As if there were one proper way to be American--a common note, but still a hypocritical one in a country that touts its pluralism.

Sununu later tried to explain what he really meant: "What I thought I said but guess I didn't say is that the president has to learn the American formula for creating business," meaning that the private sector is supposed to do it, thus adding jobs, not government.

Really?  New Deal policies that put people to work were devised by people who hadn't learned to be American?  So all those defense contractors and road construction companies in the Eisenhower era didn't do it the American way?  Absurd, and there's still the implication of Sununu's remark--if his ally Romney's policy stances are truly American, then those of us who disagree with them are what?  You guessed it, and I suppose Congress had better revive its Committee on Un-American Activities to safeguard the nation.

A Paranoid Style in American Politics for the Millennial Era

The historian Richard Hofstadter wrote "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" for Harper's back in 1964. In this now well-known piece he compared 19th century conspiracy theories with those of the "radical right" of his day, the John Birch Society and others whose political rhetoric featured "heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy."

He thought the comparison was a stretch--that the paranoid of his day were markedly different from the anti-Catholic Know-Nothings and other 19th century wingnuts:

If, after our historically discontinuous examples of the paranoid style, we now take the long jump to the contemporary right wing, we find some rather important differences from the nineteenth-century movements. The spokesmen of those earlier movements felt that they stood for causes and personal types that were still in possession of their country–that they were fending off threats to a still established way of life. But the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.

Has anything changed in the last fifty years? Do we not hear in the anti-Obama/liberal/progressive tirades a lament for the disappearance of a "real America" and calls to take it back? Don't we hear wild accusations of socialism, communism, and treason? Consider other Hofstadter characterizations:

. . .The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms–he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. . .

. . .A special significance attaches to the figure of the renegade from the enemy cause. . .

. . .One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed. . .

The current hysteria over Muslims gives us all these facets of paranoia. You'll run smack into the apocalyptic gloom at websites like Jihad Watch or in books like "Stealth Jihad." And think of those ex-Muslims "telling all" about the evils of their former faith. Or watch one of Glenn Beck's overwrought chalkboard exercises.

I'm thinking the only difference between Hofstadter's day and ours is the name of the threat.

Hysteria becoming the norm?

The Harris Poll came out with a survey revealing the hysteria bubbling out there among the masses, an hysteria no doubt resulting from a combination of an economic crisis, seemingly unending war, and the presence of a black man in the White House. The results are rather stunning. 4 of 10 Americans think President Obama's a socialist? Nearly a third still think he's a Muslim? Between 1 and 2 of every ten Americans think he's the Anti-Christ? It's not surprising that the lower one's education, the more likely one is to agree with these statements, but the data also show that ideology and party identification matter much more than level of education for most of the statements. Fear-driven belief can trump any amount of education.

Question	Total	High School or less	Conser-vatives	Repub-licans
He is a socialist	40	45	67	67
He wants to take away  Americans' right to own guns	38	45	63	61
He is a Muslim	32	43	51	57
He wants to turn over the  sovereignty of the United States  to a one world government	29	37	52	51
He has done many things that  are unconstitutional	29	35	53	55
He resents America's heritage	27	31	49	47
He does what Wall Street and  the bankers tell him to do	27	35	38	40
He was not born in the United  States and so is not eligible to  be president	25	32	41	45
He is a domestic enemy that the  U.S. Constitutions speaks of	25	32	45	45
He is a racist	23	28	42	42
He is anti-American	23	27	43	41
He wants to use an economic  collapse or terrorist attack as an  excuse to take dictatorial  powers	23	28	40	41
He is doing many of the things  that Hitler did	20	24	36	38
He may be the Anti-Christ	14	18	24	24
He wants the terrorists to win	13	16	23	22

Here's my two cents on each of the statements--

He is a socialist: Socialism is a political-economic system in which the state owns the means of production. We're nowhere close to that, but the US, like all countries, does have a government that intervenes in numerous areas of the economy. If President Obama is a socialist, then so is any homeowner writing off mortgage interest when they do their taxes, any college student getting Pell Grants or federally subsidized loans, any veteran getting GI benefits, any driver racing along an interstate highway, any one using a public library or school, and so on, and so on. If Obama is a socialist, we're all socialists.

He wants to take away Americans' right to own guns: Yes, he's okay with government restricting the use of handguns. Fine with me. But voiding the entire right? Give me a break.

He is a Muslim: For those who don't want to use the N word, you just call him this.

He wants to turn over the sovereignty of the United States to a one world government: Conspiracy theorists have been dreaming up some variation of this since anti-Catholics worried that all those Irish immigrants in the 1840s-50s meant an impending Vatican takeover of the US. We see this fear of losing sovereignty in Cold War sci-fi film (The Blob, Invasion of the Body Snatchers) and TV (the Borg in Star Trek). It's our individualism writ large, and run amok.

He has done many things that are unconstitutional: In his continuation of certain Bush-Cheney era War on Terror measures, I'd have to agree.

He resents America's heritage: He may very well resent particular aspects of that heritage, like slavery, Jim Crow, nativist bigotry, etc. Understandable.

He does what Wall Street and the bankers tell him to do: Like Bush, Sr. during the Savings and Loan bailout--the Bush and then the Obama administration worried more about socializing the liability banks amassed then rescuing individuals who lost their pensions or their homes. This is just a fact of political life: the financial class has a great deal of power to shape banking and monetary policies.

He was not born in the United States and so is not eligible to be president: Again, this is just another way not to use the N word.

He is a domestic enemy that the U.S. Constitutions speaks of: Ditto.

He is a racist: A favorite rhetorical ploy of a socially privileged group losing the entitlements it unconsciously enjoyed due to its race, sex, sexual preference, religion, etc. So threatened whites accuse blacks of racism, men declare feminists are engaged in a 'war on boys,' straight people argue that equal rights for gays are special or extra rights, Christians complain about not being able to dominate the public square

He is anti-American: this presumes some widely agreed upon definition of American, and it's typically the accusation of those who can't bear to live in a pluralist world.

He wants to use an economic collapse or terrorist attack as an excuse to take dictatorial powers: more conspiracy theory claptrap

He is doing many of the things that Hitler did: the lazy labeling tactic too many of us resort to dismiss an argument, but an effective tactic because way too many don't trouble themselves to read history.

He may be the Anti-Christ: Oh, the power of myth. An Anglo-Irish minister, John Nelson Darby, invents this eschatological framework, including the notion of rapture, in the 1830s, spreads it in the US, and it takes hold of the American imagination. We're all so desperate for meaning and direction, and Darby's fanciful revision of the Bible gave so many just that. And still does. To our detriment.

He wants the terrorists to win: this is just a variation of conspiracy theory, one encouraged by Cheney and his crowd who argue in effect that we need to transform our government into a non-democratic garrison state in order to win this so-called war on terror. And if you disagree with them, you must be on side of the enemy. A variation of the intolerant 'love it or leave it' argument.

Cockroach to Beck: You're no Thomas Paine

A friend gave me Glenn Beck’s Common Sense: The Case Against an Out-of-Control Government, Inspired by Thomas Paine. It’s interesting to read a political tract in which I am such an awful or scary guy. I’m a government employee, an academic, and worse, a political scientist, and I’ve been in the company of progressives. At various points, Beck refers to these kind of people as “cockroaches,” “enemies at the gates,” and “deadly masters.”

I won’t pretend to speak for all ‘deadly enemy cockroaches’ across the land, but here’s how one of them responds to Beck’s book.

As the subtitle informs us, Glenn says the book is inspired by Thomas Paine, and it includes Paine’s 1776 Common Sense. Beck does readers a service by including it—perhaps it will inspire more folks to read him (it is, however, widely available for free on various websites). I wonder, though, how many of his readers will actually read the Paine portion. Even if they do, they’ll find precious little to connect Beck’s text with Paine, beyond the phrase “common sense,” which Beck repeats, as if saying it lots of times will make it so. I think of common sense as referring to things like ‘Don’t pick up a hot cast iron pan with your bare hand,’ or ‘look both ways before crossing a street,’ or ‘don’t expect everything to end hunky dory if you sleep with your best friend’s girl- or boyfriend.' No, for Beck, his opinion is common sense.

And he’s not just delivering common sense. He’s the mouthpiece of God:

America has let thieves into her home and that nagging in your gut is a final warning that our country is about to be stolen. Our Founding Fathers understood that our rights and liberties are gifts from God. They also understood that WE are an intuitive people. If all that is true, then it only makes sense that He would alert us to our impending loss.

And now He is—shame on us for ignoring Him for so long.

The 'God-talk' is curious, for Paine was hostile to the Christian religion (see Paine's Age of Reason). But such selectivity is not surprising, and the passage above is pretty representative of what we get in the rest of the book. Drumbeats of fear. Pronouncements on US history of dubious veracity. Lots of caps because that’s what Talk TV and Radio hosts think wins arguments: YELLING. A jumble of different ideas thrown together in a single paragraph.

Amid the clichés, name-calling (“border-line sociopaths), the histrionics (“WE ARE NOT SHEEP”), the hyperbole (“The chains of economic slavery. . .are about to snap shut around the necks of our children. . .”), we get the standard conservative critique that I’ve been hearing since I started paying attention to politics in the mid-1970s: America is going to hell; we need to revive an idealized Leave it to Beaver American past; schools no longer teach “real history” and are instead brainwashing our kids; distrust “them,” you know, those “experts,” and get big government off our backs, out of our pockets, and away from our guns.

Along with this we have a walloping sense of marginalization: “The fastest way to be branded a danger, a militia member, or just plain crazy is to quote the words of our Founding Fathers.” That is so absurd that I can only guess that Beck misunderstands the criticism he’s faced. It’s not the material he uses. It’s how he uses it, and his delivery.

Take Thomas Paine. The Paine section includes an Introduction and four essays that give us arguments against monarchy and for a war for independence. Beck could have drawn analogies, drawing parallels between Paine’s indictment of monarchical rule and the increasing concentration of authority in the US executive branch. He could have mused over connections between his own call for a non-violent revolution and Paine’s efforts to mobilize support for the war for independence. And he could have adopted Paine’s tone. Here’s Paine’s opening passage from Common Sense:

In the following sheets, the author hath studiously avoided every thing which is personal among ourselves. Compliments as well as censure to individuals make no part thereof. The wise and the worthy need not the triumph of a pamphlet; and those whose sentiments are injudicious or unfriendly, will cease of themselves, unless too much pains are bestowed upon their conversion.

Beck, instead, gives us sophomoric wit:

Politicians, like cockroaches, are not stupid creatures. Both have an uncanny ability to survive, consume all things living or dead, and can apparently live up to one month without their heads—though I would argue that politicians can survive much longer than that.

Beck also gives us a big dose of conspiracy theory. Beginning with Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, progressives, the new bogeymen, have been working patiently, cleverly, evilly, to create a fascist, socialist, or communist regime (the terms are interchangeable in Beck’s intellectual world). Beck says it’s not a conspiracy theory, but to borrow from another famous conspiracy theorist—‘If it walks like a duck. . .

That said, I can understand Beck’s conspiricist bent and his fear, even if I dislike his style and disagree with starting assumptions and his conclusions. In Real Enemies, historian Katheryn Olmsed argues that Americans are prone to developing conspiracy theories in part because the US government indeed has engaged in conspiracies. As the scope and size of government began to grow during and after WW I,

It gained the power to conspire agains its citizens, and and it soon began exercising that power. By the height of the cold war, government agents had consorted with mobsters to kill a foreign leader [Castro], dropped hallucinogenic drugs into the drinks of unsuspecting Americans in random bars [MKULTRA], and considered launching fake terrorist attacks on Americans in the United States.

As well, the government handed Americans conspiracy theories that they were to believe in, from a Japanese Fifth Column during WW II or, soon after, a State Department completely infiltrated by communists, on to the Al Qaeda-Saddam Hussein connection that the Bush-Cheney administration sold to the public.

With revelations of real government conspiracies, and with the US government trying to promote particular conspiracy narratives, and then spying on and harassing dissenters, you get an environment rich with conspiratorial possibilities. For example, during the Iran-Contra affair, the CIA turned a blind eye to Contra drug-runners selling crack in LA. While Olmstead thinks it’s preposterous that this was part of a government campaign to destroy the African-American population, it certainly makes more understandable why people might believe in such a conspiracy.

Finally, I can also understand Beck’s anti-intellectualism. We academics, for example, can be tremendous snobs, and much of our writing is inaccessible to the lay public (much of it is even inaccessible to me!). Still, his knee-jerk rejection of “experts” is also an awfully convenient way to protect his view of the world, and his arguments, from any evidence or reasoning that might contradict his own.