Factual but Untrue
“I may be wrong, but at least I’m not lying” is a statement made by Owen Benjamin that I often circle back to as a signifier of a shift towards personality-driven, Conspiratualist content upon the wider Internet. The statements highlight the appeal to authenticity juxtaposed with a seemingly humbling rejection of self-authored authority. However, there has always been the question that “if people are flocking to Conspiratualists for information, what are they fleeing from”? In general, I was content in just marking that down as “the mainstream media lies” and coming back to interrogate that thought later, as I couldn’t quite think of a pithy way to unpick the issue. However, Dave Smith of the Part of the Problem podcast did that work for me by stating that mainstream media reporting is “mostly factual, but often untrue”. Smith, a self-professed Libertarian, strikes right at the heart of anti-neoliberal self-radicalisation - the belief that mainstream media content seeks to reinforce the authoritative information produced by institutional policy design, even when policy fails to measure reality properly.
You might be saying to yourself that it is Science and the Scientific method which measure reality. However, this overlooks the ontological crisis in which there are social realities that see Science as the institutional power that uses methods entrenched in social acceptability to reinforce the authority of policymakers. It is policy-informed evidence-making rather than evidence-based policymaking. Given the degree to which neoliberal capital is considered to have corrupted Technology, Pharmaceutical and Media companies (alongside politics and non-profit organisations), ‘factual but untrue’ becomes an instantly available heuristic by which to dismiss the authenticity of the information in that facts become untrue because the authenticity of the source can not be verified. To me, this appears to indicate a shift away from the Internet as a site of information-seeking towards a site of seeking-authenticity. Something which needs to be further explored.
Goyim Defense League
As the Neo-Nazi National Justice Party (NJP) readies itself for it’s first meeting in Florida, the closely aligned Fash the Nation (FTN) podcast interviewed a couple of members of the Goyim Defense League (GDL) who were recently troubled by police during a leafleting campaign within the State. It is difficult to confirm the accuracy of the story that was told, but there were some interesting points to consider. First is that there appears to be an attempt at “cross-pollination”, with members of the GDL not only advertising the NJP and appearing on FTN - but also creating closer ties with Mark Colette and the British Patriotic Alternative (PA) movement. Second is that the GDL seems younger than the mostly Gen X NJP crowd. While members of the NJP have mostly relegated themselves to podcasting on The Right Stuff (TRS) network, the Zoomers / Later Millennials of the GDL are taking to live streaming their political campaigning activities (and subsequent interactions with police) for their audience.