Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

Someone might just ignore it but open another Pandora's box.

There was one predictable, though certainly not universal, response to the release of footage showing the assault on the husband of Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.): that the gruesome snippet of police body-cam video bolstered ongoing, baseless conspiracy theories about that event rather than quite obviously dismantling them.

This is the nature of conspiracy theories, after all. Like a stream of water encountering an obstacle, they reroute, using whatever happens to be available to keep pressing forward. After all, it’s that movement that’s the point. It’s not the water itself or the route that matters. It’s the ability to point to it as a flowing, living stream because that stream invariably is used as evidence for something else. The conspiracy theory isn’t about the incident, it’s about how the incident bolsters some larger viewpoint or concept.

And for those making baseless claims about the Pelosi attack, that larger viewpoint is the same as the one that so many recent conspiracy theories have been crafted to serve: that Democrats are evil.
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The Pelosi attack conspiracy theories similarly comport with this theme. It’s not worth getting into the specifics of the claims that quickly emerged following news of the assault, much less adjudicating them. The release of the body-cam footage makes very clear that what was described as happening is what actually happened. But even in the first minutes after it came out, there was an effort to identify anomalies in the video that might allow observers to cast suspicion on Pelosi and not his attacker — since Pelosi, by virtue of being a Pelosi, should be assumed by these parties to have been acting nefariously. That the attacker espoused right-wing rhetoric no doubt contributed to the effort to instead center questions on Pelosi.

The most extreme version of this idea is the most explicit: QAnon. It holds, in most formulations, that there is a devious cabal of evil actors — Democratic leaders, Hollywood elites (a.k.a. liberal Democrats) and the media (a.k.a. liberal Democrats) — that are conspiring together, perhaps to abuse children. It is the purest distillation of a movement centered on theoretical left-wing evil, one that’s been constructed from various and varying elements in service of that narrative. Even the child-abuse aspect of it is downstream from willful misreadings of emails stolen from a Clinton campaign staffer that were published by WikiLeaks in 2016. Democrats are evil, therefore their seemingly anodyne words must somehow be hiding secret evil messages.

Democrats are evil, therefore even when a Democrat appears to be a victim of assault, that Democrat must actually be the one at fault. Democrats are evil, therefore the unsurprising loss of an unpopular president in an election must come down to Democrats stealing votes or sneakily boosting turnout or controlling social-media sites to influence the outcome.

This approach has obvious rewards. Right-wing filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza hoovered up money with the release of his film “2000 Mules” last year, a film utterly bereft of any evidence of wrongdoing. Fox News recognizes that just asking questions about things like the Pelosi attack is, one, what much of its audience wants to hear and, two, bolsters their long-standing Republicans-good-Democrats-bad theme. And, of course, there are myriad right-wing voices jockeying for the lucrative benefits of grabbing the right’s attention.

Even when a conspiracy theory is entirely uprooted, you see how the broader conspiracy theory — that Democrats are bad — simply redirects around it.

Fox News guest blames Black single mothers for the killing of Tyre Nichols
01/27/23 9:11 PM EST

Tucker Carlson says white people are victims of “racial hatred” amid coverage of Tyre Nichols killing
01/27/23 8:53 PM EST

Fox News host Jesse Watters says Tyre Nichols was killed because “police tactics have been hamstrung”
01/27/23 8:00 PM EST

Fox News host demands representation of “the cops’ perspective” on the killing of Tyre Nichols
01/27/23 5:53 PM EST

deceit
dishonesty
corruption
disgrace
dishonor
incompleteness

The Associated Press Stylebook, considered one of the most reliable guides to correct use of the English language for journalists, has apologised after producing a list of terms it thought could be dehumanising that included “the French”.

There is a documentary coming out on Vice called "The Dangerous Rise of Andrew Tate."

I heard the film maker being interviwed on the radio. The documentary includes secret recordings Tate's victims made where they get him to admit raping them.

This was taken to the metropolitan police who did nothing.

The film maker has also received numerous death threats from Tate's supporters.

Your last paragraph's question is fraught with pitfalls. There would have to be so many qualifiers and conditions that it would become an unusable 'answer'.

So, what if (for whatever set of reasons) a political movement arose which attracted such personalities and if that movement became viable and increasingly powerful and present within the culture, couldn't we predict that levels of dishonesty and instances of the absence of integrity would increase?

The brutal, politically motivated attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, explained
Footage and audio reveals new details about the attack, which is the culmination of Republicans’ years-long efforts to make Nancy Pelosi out to be a public enemy.