The Collapse of the Narratives is Danger and Opportunity

AMAC Exclusive – By David P. Deavel

An old Yiddish proverb says, “The truth never dies but lives a miserable life.” We who have been designated “conspiracy theorists” or purveyors of “misinformation” or “disinformation” over the last few years by tech companies, the media, and even government know what that means. Even now big tech platforms are using Orwellian-sounding “Trust & Safety” teams to censor materials and deplatform individuals who dare to tell truths and ask questions that pose a danger to the power of corporations and political figures whose power depends on concealing or deforming those truths.   

Right now we are drinking champagne out of our tinfoil hats. We always knew that misinformation was a term that only partially concealed its meaning: information they want us to miss.

The narratives enforced by the media/DNC/tech industrial complex over the last few years are all collapsing as facts that were denied or hidden have started to become impossible to deny. This moment poses an unmistakable danger but also an opportunity.

What are these narratives? The most important one is that those media and big tech companies were simply “private corporations” who were making decisions about what they could allow on their platforms. How dare you, the line went, say you favor economic freedom when you don’t want to allow social media or entertainment corporations to decide what to allow people to post or upload? 

That line sounded good for those who didn’t think about it. It always ignored the obvious objection that social media platforms were supposed to be shielded from legal scrutiny and lawsuits precisely because they are not publishers but simply platforms for free political speech. Nobody objected to censorship of child porn, solicitation of human trafficking, or the organization of violent activities. But the discussion of the truth about topics relating to COVID or the corruption in Joe Biden’s family or other conversations pertinent to our national life were—and still are on many platforms—treated as severely or more severely than actual abuses. The most important revelations of the Twitter Files were that the priorities were not being set  not by some independent private company that is not subject to the First Amendment. Instead, agents of the United States government were putting pressure on the company to censor certain points of view. And we know these claims aren’t simply part of the fabled Vast Right Wing Conspiracy because the ones who broke open this story were left-wing journalists such as Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi, and Michael Schellenberger.

And censor they did—and still do on many of them—views deemed to be conspiracy theories. 1) The revelations about Hunter Biden’s laptop. 2) That COVID might have come not from a wet market but a lab—most likely one that had funding from the U. S. arranged by one Dr. Anthony Fauci. 3) That community masking had no effect on respiratory diseases. 4) That not only might the mRNA COVID vaccines be less efficacious than advertised but that they might have more serious side-effects as risks. 5) That the events of January 6 might both have been exaggerated and that they might have had participation and perhaps provocation by both radical leftists and even federal agents.

Yet all those “conspiracy theories” might better be called “spoiler alerts.” “Mainstream” news agencies have belatedly admitted that Hunter’s laptop was…Hunter’s laptop. Oh, and by the way, that means that there might be something to the information on it indicating that Hunter’s business had a lot to do with influence peddling. So too with all the rest. An investigation by the FBI and an office of the Energy Department responsible for regulating laboratories has concluded that the lab leak theory is most likely correct. An investigation of all the studies on masking and COVID by the prestigious Cochrane Institute concludes that masking had no effect—a conclusion that matched all the known science before the summer of 2020, by the way. And acknowledgments of the underperformance of the mRNA vaccines keep proceeding apace—along with admissions of the risks for reactions such as myocarditis for younger people.

But the most spectacular narrative to collapse has been that of a January 6, 2020, “insurrection.” Again, those who have followed the reporting of journalists such as American Greatness’s Julie Kelly will not be surprised to find out that what was reported on these events was drastically one-sided. But because of Kevin McCarthy’s release of thousands of hours of surveillance footage to Tucker Carlson, many more people are now realizing they’ve been had. Capitol police officer Brian Sicknick, said to have been killed during the day, was actually walking around unharmed during the time he had been said to have been harmed. “QAnon Shaman” Jacob Shansberg—supposedly a ringleader of this “insurrection”—seems to have had multiple police officers escorting him around the Capitol to take pictures from suspiciously well-placed photographers. Video of him denouncing violence and calling for peaceful protest is now available. And more footage keeps emerging of Trump supporters trying to stop those who were doing damage to the Capitol or acting violently—some of them dressed in the black bloc of Antifa. Yet though Shansberg was sentenced to four years in prison, Ray Epps has not been arrested despite footage of him inciting violence. 

There is something rotten here. There is great danger when politicians and corporations are trapped in their own lies. Will they unleash further the power of state and big business on conservative Americans? The grossly lawless treatment of the hundreds of people convicted of “parading” and other such non-insurrection offenses on January 6 shows that a false narrative will be propped up by legal force. The treatment of dissenters from the narratives about COVID and vaccines have lost jobs and businesses with little hope of reparations for their treatment that was merely based on The Science and not actual science. Without justice for them, the prospects of tyranny based on “public health” returning increase.

If there is danger, however, there is also opportunity. We tinfoil hatters are drinking champagne because we believe that though the truth lives a miserable life, it will ultimately prevail. “One word of truth,” the great Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, “outweighs the whole world.” We don’t see complete triumph right now, but we do see a collapse in ratings for propaganda outlets such as CNN. We do see more and more left and center-left journalists admitting the truth about many of the topics in question and more. Many, like Bari Weiss, have abandoned those old institutions such as the New York Times in order to set up real reporting on platforms such as Substack.

The danger of the collapse of the narratives is a crackdown. The opportunity is that it looks like a collapse of many corrupt systems and the birth of new ones. We should indeed celebrate and await expectantly the final collapse. We should also point others to those heroic figures of the right, but also the center and even, sometimes, the old left, who have been exposing the lies, often at great cost to themselves. Not all heroes wear capes—some of them are depicted wearing tinfoil hats.

David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas, and is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative.