The Crazy Contagion

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, September 13, 2024

 

Laura Loomer isn’t the problem. 

 

Don’t get me wrong, I think she’s a horrible person, an avowed white nationalist, “proud Islamaphobe,” and she’s hurting Trump. I don’t mind that she’s hurting Trump, of course. I just want to be clear that I’m not riding to her defense or minimizing awfulness. 

 

But the MAGA types and normie Republicans alike are acting as if Loomer has Trump under a spell, like she’s Thulsa Doom and Trump is King Osric’s bewitched maiden daughter. The idea that but for Loomer’s baleful influence Trump would behave normally is a symptom of copium poisoning. This is the guy who while defending the National Enquirer’s trial balloon about Ted Cruz’s dad assassinating JFK would refer to the tabloid as the news. This is the guy who still thinks that Hillary Clinton used actual bleach on her server. He thinks all humans have a limited amount of energy in their batteries and therefore exercise is bad because it depletes your finite reserves.

 

I could go on, but the point is he didn’t get his crazy from Loomer and that Laura Loomer didn’t “get” to Trump. No, Trump is just the sort of guy who thinks Laura Loomer (and Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jack Posobiec, Alex Jones, Sidney Powell, et al) is totally respectable and insightful. 

 

Indeed, if you described the last 10 years to someone who just woke up out of a coma, they might think Trump is the Laura Loomer at the center of American politics, given how he’s made so many people crazy. Imagine trying to explain to someone who had been in a deep sleep since 2014 what happened to, say, Rudy Giuliani. Eric Metaxas was once considered an even keeled sorta guy who railed against the demonization of political opponents. Now, he literally thinks Trump’s political opponents are demons or possessed by them. Tucker Carlson has a similar view of the aliens living among us. Mike Lee was once one of the most decent, sober, and down-to-earth politicians in the GOP. Now, he’s so drunk on Trump’s pheromones it’s like he lost his mind with his hair. 

 

And it’s not just folks on the right. Lots of once normal liberal people have looked into the abyss of Trump and the abyss has looked back. 

 

In other words, the bigger issue isn’t that Trump has a tolerance for crazy people, it’s that he makes once-sane people crazy. Of course, he attracts the fringy and freakish folks. But all powerful people attract crazies. The difference is that he doesn’t hold it against them; he encourages it, so long as part of your crazy portfolio is the belief that he’s never in error and can bake 12-minute brownies in six minutes. 

 

That said, I think one of the things you learn as you get older is that lots of people are just weird, crazy, neurodivergent, whatever. I actually have a soft spot in my heart for wacky people. And even if I didn’t, keeping wacky people out of politics is probably impossible. What is lunatic to some is just passion or even faith to others. I want to be clear, I don’t think being very religious is unhinged—far from it. It’s often an indispensable way of staying hinged. But I know plenty of atheists who think religious faith is irredeemably irrational and dangerous. And I know some religious people who think atheism is a kind of amoral madness. The point I’m trying to make is that there’s a lot of room in a free society for different worldviews. Too much of our politics is about who has the wrong worldview and too little is about whether they have the wrong facts—or no facts at all. 

 

Truth claims aren’t a lot of use in arguments about questions that inherently involve a leap of faith, at least not to people who won’t make the leap with you. But truth claims are essential to adjudicating policy and political disagreements. So forget religion. Let’s look at bigotry. 

 

I think the Haitians eating cats stuff is racist and bigoted. But if Haitian migrants were stealing and eating cats in Springfield, I think it would be perfectly legitimate to cite it as evidence our immigration policies are problematic (though the Haitians in question are not illegal immigrants and many didn’t come here under Biden). And racists would agree with me. Yet that wouldn’t make my position racist. But because it’s not true, the people insisting it is true are pushing a lie, a racist lie. They might not think they’re being racist, or nativist, or some other form of bigot. And my response to them would be “You’re wrong.” And my proof would be that they’re lying about the facts. 

 

If you claim Jews drink the blood of Christian babies, you’re an antisemite—or peddling antisemitism—because that’s a lie. If Jews were doing such things, antisemites would certainly make a big deal about it. But so would a lot of other people. This is true across the waterfront. If you argue that the national debt isn’t a problem, that Vladimir Putin is a man of peace, that climate change is an existential threat—or a myth—the only way such claims can be adjudicated is if you bring facts to the table. In other words, whatever your larger worldview, if the facts are on your side, you have an argument worth contending with. It doesn’t mean you, or your conclusions, or proposed remedies, are right, but that’s why arguments are valuable: to get at the truth. Arguments that cannot be settled by facts aren’t arguments; they’re disagreements about tastes or contests of faiths. 

 

The problem we have these days is that most arguments fall into those latter categories. People start with the opinion and then grab what facts they can to support them. That can at least be defended in some circumstances. But when people invent the facts or egregiously distort them—another term for lying—to fit their positions, we’re through the looking glass. 

 

I had a great conversation with Christine Rosen about her new book, The Extinction of Experience on The Remnant this week. One of the things we got into was how technology is changing the way we experience reality to the point where people are simply designing the reality they want. The people posting AI renderings of cats and dogs being rescued by Donald Trump are curating a kind of cartoonish version of the reality they want, not the one that is true. 

 

This is a natural human tendency. “Some things have to be believed to be seen” as Ralph Hodgson said. What’s changed isn’t human nature but technology. America has had many eruptions of populism over its history. Sometimes the populists had legitimate grievances on their side, even if they let their passion get the better of them. But we had technologies to deal with these explosions of popular passion. The core one is the Constitution itself, which is designed to channel, temper, and harness passion toward productive ends. The political parties were designed to do something similar. And, the media played an important role in this process too. 

 

Journalists have been known to get caught up in popular passion and outrage over injustices. The job of editors is to take that journalistic passion for truth telling and illuminating injustice and subject it to skepticism. Did the reporter get the facts right? Did she seek a contrary point of view? Did he do the due diligence? 

 

Our modern technology has cut out that editorial function from the process for millions of people. Social media is a conduit for rivers of nonsense, falsehood, fact free anger and passion. What we do about that is a complicated and difficult question. But part of the problem is that the places that still nominally have an editorial function are just bad at it. 

 

American elite institutions have a nonsense problem. If you think of these institutions—the media, but also universities, government, foundations, organized religion etc.—as the “brain” of America, it’s like our blood is full of bovine fecal particulates and our blood-brain-barrier (BBB) is losing the ability to filter them out. 

 

That would be bad enough, but the problem is compounded by the tendency to believe that this is only a problem for the other side. Democrats and their allies in the media, universities, etc. work assiduously to detect and debunk what they deem to be B.S. from the right. Republicans and their institutional allies are similarly primed to lock onto B.S. from the left. But nonsense that bubbles up from their own respective sides is ignored, indulged, or amplified without much care, never mind scrutiny. And because the other side sees that, they think that gives them permission to do the same thing in return. It’s a vicious cycle of whataboutism: “They indulge their wackjobs, so why should we police ours?”

 

Since I’ve focused on the right, let’s illustrate the point with an example from the left.

 

Take the idea that “policing” was invented after the American Civil War to catch fugitive slaves. “Policing itself started out as slave patrols. We know that,” Rep. James Clyburn declared on Fox News. 

 

That idea ran through the highest ranks of the Democratic Party and made plenty of appearances in leading op-ed pages, the same op-ed pages where you’ll find no shortage of people insisting that fabulism is solely a problem of the right.  

 

For the record, it is true that a handful of police departments in the South transitioned fugitive slave catchers into their early police departments. But that doesn’t mean policing qua policing was invented in those states or that, as many insinuated or asserted, that modern day policing is just fugitive slave catching in disguise. The police function is thousands of years old. It’s one of the first features of the state—any state. Every country in the world has police. As I wrote during all of that moral panic:

 

The oldest policing institutions are probably forgotten to history, because the very idea of a polis, city state, or society more advanced than a tribe of hunter-gatherers is bound up in the idea of providing security. Still, the Egyptians had police 3,000 years ago. The Babylonian paqūdu were patrolling the streets of Uruk before Jesus was born. The oldest “modern” police in Europe are the York Minster constables, who were founded in 1275.

 

I could go even further. There’s a case that the stuff from the left is the bigger problem. That’s because the left controls the commanding heights of the culture. So even if you think the left’s craziness is less dangerous or bigoted than the right’s—not always a defensible position—it has a greater chance of making a real impact precisely because the left runs the more important institutions. 

 

I’ll give you two examples. First, I’m fine with conceding for argument’s sake that, say, the Boston police department is fruit of the poisoned tree of the Fugitive Slave Act is a less idiotic and mendacious claim than the idea that the government is making people gay or that John F. Kennedy Jr. is alive and will come out of hiding to endorse Donald Trump, or even that Haitians are eating people’s cats. The consequences of the “slave patrol” theory on public policy are arguably more dangerous (which is not to say the nativism running wild on the right couldn’t lead to some horrible things).  

 

Or take antisemitism today. The right definitely has an antisemitism problem. Losers and cranks like Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens, et al, are a noxious force on the right. I don’t think they’re as representative of attitudes on the broader right as some claim, but the mere fact there’s not much interest in a zero-tolerance policy for that crowd is dismaying. 

 

But the left’s antisemitism problem is arguably much worse, not because the antisemitism is necessarily more virulent (a debatable point) but because it manifests itself in elite universities, NGOs, and the media, with myriad real ramifications, foreign and domestic. The left, broadly speaking, conceives of itself as definitionally the Party of Tolerance. Its institutions and language are built around this psychology. So it lacks the mechanisms, intuitions, and vocabulary required to deal with bigots in their ranks. 

 

It’s no coincidence that so many hardcore lefties feel compelled to cast “Zionists” as “Nazis” and “racists”—they cannot let go of their self-conception as “anti-fascists.” University administrators can deploy the language and rules of “tolerance” with practiced ease when decrying “Islamaphobia” and “homophobia” but find themselves tongue-tied when dealing with Judeophobia from the left because its existence threatens the whole cathedral of their self-conception. So many of the defenses of, say, UNRWA work backward. The U.N. is an emblem of how the world should operate, and therefore what it does should be good. When you point out that UNRWA is a proven accomplice to anti-Jewish terrorism, many people say that can’t be true because it shouldn’t be true. 

 

In short, many of our leading institutions, which again, are controlled by the left broadly defined, have lost much of their editorial capacity. The Democratic Party of even 20 years ago, would not only not tolerate some of the garbage peddled by the anti-Israel left. They wouldn’t even try. The GOP of 10 years ago wouldn’t tolerate the nonsense that is now not only tolerated, but celebrated on the right. 

 

The market for nonsense is too strong and our elites are too weak or too confused about their obligations to stand in the way of the idea that the customer is always right.