Jack Shafer, Politico's media correspondent, argues this morning that because there's a "fat chance" that Republicans will ever permit Congress to adequately investigate the attempted Trumpian coup of Jan. 6, it will be up to the press to answer heretofore unaddressed questions and, equally important, to "sort the Jan. 6 sense from the nonsense wherever and whenever it appears" — nonsense such as Antifa's involvement, of "peaceful protesters," and most recently of Tucker Carlson's "tangled commentary that proposed that the FBI itself helped perpetrate the riots."
Still stinging from all the Stop the Steal nonsense, Shafer asks, "How long must we suffer" from lunatic conspiracy theories? "The short answer is 'forever,'" he writes, since "the human appetite for alternative, and usually hair-brained, explanations for why events blossomed the way they did can never be sated." That's true, although the observation also leaves us with the decidedly uncomfortable conclusion that sorting "sense from the nonsense" is in fact a hopeless venture, as far as any permanent correction goes.
Shafer then adds this rather startling line: "As long as anxieties about an uncertain future persist, people will devise irrational and inconsistent theories." Anxieties, yes. But conspiracy theories have much more to do with the past and present than any undetermined future. Even more than that, they have to do with some people's superior self-image.
Their initial anxiety arises from the feeling of being out of control over whatever alternative situation they preferred — and that feeling is one of inferiority, which must be extinguished by feeling in control. This, as historian Richard Hofstadter brilliantly showed in his 1964 Harper's essay, leads to seeking special inside knowledge of "what really happened," which we ignoramuses and "elitists" either cannot grasp or purposely refuse to accept. Hence the gathering or assimilation of pedantic "evidence" whose whole overwhelms the parts, such as Carlson's piecing together of FBI involvement in Jan. 6. — and as for that darkest of days, cynical Republican pols, who know better, have been all too happy to exploit conspiratorial Trumpers' sense of epistemic superiority.
My advice? That each member of the Fourth Estate read Hofstadter carefully before attempting to counter the almost innumerable conspiracy theories now surrounding Trump's coup. Assuming, that is, that the historian's delineation of the paranoid style won't leave them too depressed to carry on.