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"Falling For A Con Is Painful" - Mueller, Media, & The Big Lie

"Here's the fundamental "story" of the Mueller Investigation: elites don't like "the little people" democratizing public narratives. The elites--who reckon their right to rule is self-evident--want to set the narrative and the context, because that's the foundation of power: once you get the citizenry to agree on your narrative and context, you secure two valuable things: 1) political legitimacy and 2) their obedience.

Elite anxiety over the "the little people" democratizing narratives is not a new phenomenon. Elites have demanded control of any media outlet that doesn't parrot their line and have tried to declare skeptical inquiry sedition for generations, stretching back to the founding of the Republic.

The elite interest in controlling the narrative and context long predates the era of "fake news." Please read this excerpt from the 1991 book The Radicalism of the American Revolution about the democratization of everyday life in post-Revolutionary War America (1790 - 1830):

"The result of all these assaults on elite opinion and celebrations of common ordinary judgment was a dispersion of authority and ultimately a diffusion of truth itself to a degree the world had never seen. With every ordinary person being told his ideas and tastes, on everything from medicine to art to government, were as good as, if not better than, those of "connoisseurs" and "speculative men" who had college degrees, it is not surprising that truth and knowledge became elusive and difficult to pin down."

This democratization deeply unsettled the elites, who were accustomed to leading by setting the "acceptable" narrative and context. Democracy, they discovered to their chagrin, isn't a force that one can bottle up and dispense in measured doses around election time; it spreads throughout every sphere of the society.

This reliance on one's own judgment depreciated the power not only of self-appointed elites but of those claiming superiority based on credentials. As novelist Herman Melville understood so acutely, this democratization of everything  made everyone, pundit and commoner alike, a potential mark for a con and a potential chump for a compelling pitch that appealed to vanity, social aspirations and what we now call virtue-signaling.

Melville laid all this out in one of my favorite novels, The Confidence-Man, ostensibly a collection of stories about a motley cast of characters on a Mississippi riverboat but actually a meditation on the nature of trust, confidence and cons.

This puts Melville's 1857 novel at the very heart of the Mueller Investigation as various elite-promoted narratives are revealed as cons. Authority, of course, is well-placed to push The Big Con; declaring "the truth of the matter" as an article of faith is the acme of The Big Con.

Democracy requires all Americans take responsibility for sorting the wheat from the chaff. We're all potential marks, so we have to remain skeptical of every context and every narrative being pushed by authorities, elites, self-appointed experts, etc., all of whom are of course as self-serving as anyone else trying to advance their interests with a compelling story. ...."

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-03-25/falling-con-painful-mueller-media-big-lie