One of the most revelatory works of journalism for a long time appeared recently in the Columbia Journalism Review.
At almost 50,000 words it's an investment to read the whole thing and most people will settle for reading the multitude of articles about it, rather than the original.
But the original is a must if you're serious about understanding the processes by which facts can morph into fiction and how cognitively vulnerable we are, when we're inclined to view things through an ideological lens.
The press versus the president is about a conspiracy theory that I personally fell for and remained enthralled by for several years; Trump Russia or Russiagate.
Coincidentally it follows another admirable investigation that blows a different, but related, conspiracy theory out of the water. Another one that I fell for.
Anthony Mansuy, a senior writer for the French magazine Society, seems to have screwed the coffin lid shut on the story that Britain's vote to leave the European Union was partly caused by the interventions and manipulations of a sneaky political consulting outfit called Cambridge Analytica.
You can listen to a two-parter on this one by the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
Both the CJR and Mansuy/QAA pieces have high credibility, at least for me.
The Columbia Journalism Review has no political axe to grind, its raison d'être being to serve as a source of media trends analysis. As a non-profit with significant funding from liberal sources (such as George Soros's Open Society Foundations) I'm inclined to trust the CJR forensically destroying a liberal shibboleth more readily than had this work been published by, say, the Heritage Foundation.
And QAnon Anonymous, whose team seem to be a bit generally 'Woker' than me, exists primarily to report on the weirdness of right wing subcultures. Again, for them to take a deep look at a liberal shibboleth and declare it to be adjacent to something like QAnon, inclines me to higher trust.
Incentives and motivations matter. CJR seems to have little incentive to pillory Pulitzer Prize winning articles and their journalists for publishing false narratives and failing to correct the record when the facts absolutely demand it.
And QAnon Anonymous has little to gain, as a listener-supported show, from regaling a strongly liberal audience who signed up mostly to laugh at the crazier fringes of the right with a corrective to something believed by the leftish that many of us held dear.
In passing, its worth celebrating the fact that journalism that seeks to be genuinely objective and non-aligned with ideology is still being done. Even though there are many high ranking journalists (in the US in particular) who seriously argue now that objectivity is undesirable. This op ed in the Washington Post still seems incredible to me.
Looking back to the shock felt by people like me and my friends, first from Brexit and then the ascent of Trump, it's easy to blanket condemn everyone who swallowed Trump Russia and the Cambridge Analytica tales, but not particularly helpful.
Everyone is subject to cognitive biases and, the more intelligent we are, the better able to point the finger while rationalising that we are the exception. And it's hardly as if the conspiracies favoured by the right are models of sober analysis.
The truth is that we're all in this together.
All we can do is update our beliefs when the weight (or lack) of evidence demands it* and learn the lessons for next time. Because there will certainly be a next time.
Here are some of the lessons I learned from reflecting on how I fell for the Trump Russia and Cambridge Analytica stories, in no special order. If you too believed them, see if any of these chime with you.
When something politically seismic comes as a surprise it's probably because you're in a bubble.
On a train out of St Pancras, London, on the day of the Brexit referendum, I saw an early evening tweet reporting that people were 'pouring' off a particular council estate in the north, to vote. It felt chilling. I knew those people would not be voting Remain.
I had a sense that something was going on. That something or someone had got to these people to make them vote for something that was bad.
My bubble contained no people who were desperate for something to change, so those people were just a mystery to me. I wanted a more comforting reason for them winning than simply that there were more of them than I'd realised. The Cambridge Analytica story gave me that reason.
It removed the cognitive overhead of having to go back to the start and try to understand what was happening.
If you think that other people can only think what they think because something something manipulation, you're intellectually lazy.
Other people have different ideas and values. If you invest most of your time reacting to these by mocking, for example, their pride in country or tradition, this is pretty stupid. If you never noticed that the values that you don't share with others are actually quite widely held, that's you being ignorant, not them.
Here's where the Cambridge Analytica story gave me an opportunity to rationalise the superiority of my values over those of others, because their values made them vulnerable to manipulation.
It was so much easier to think this than to recognise that my values were those of a bubble. And it was comforting to keep reminding myself how much more perspicacious and insightful I was than them. And, ironically, how much less likely I believed myself to be vulnerable to misinformation.
When everyone in your bubble is negatively emoting all over the place it's exciting and contagious.
I've written about the thrill of being outraged and fearful here.
It was exciting to think that there was an evil far right that I was duty bound to resist. It was like being part of a fellowship.
Even the label - resistance - chosen by the people who were upset about there being a President Trump signifies a romanticism that confers a glamorous patina on mainly just tweeting a lot of threads or New York Times and Guardian articles.
Trump Russia was great. It was really exciting to follow the minutiae of servers in Trump Tower secretly communicating with the Russian Alfa Bank.
I once tweeted the British former MP Louise Mensch, who was inventing all sorts of nonsense about this stuff, to say how much I admired her work. Some time later she started suggesting that I might be a Russian agent and only then did I realise that the whole thing was just entertainment. Just a LARP. At least for the central participants. For everyone else it was more of a moral panic.
There are often incentives to believe one thing over another, that are unrelated to the epistemic durability of a particular case.
I enjoyed some of the reputational and financial rewards of being part of the 'resistance'. In fact, I really leveraged it.
Add to this the fact that most of the people closest to you in real life probably believe most of the same things and it just becomes easier to go with the flow. It took mindfulness practice and adopting something of a fuck it attitude, in my case, to 'come out' as a sceptic on many of my liberal intelligentsia circle's most cherished beliefs.
If anything, my intuition is that exogenic incentives are possibly even more powerful than endogenic incentives, such as reassuring yourself that you're more insightful, better informed and basically cognitively superior to people on the 'other side'.
This seems to be why so many white people in America are now adopting 'BIPOC' identities to get ahead in the burgeoning industry of Diversity Equity and Inclusion.
A culture creeps up on you, so that eventually you're just like the fish that has no idea that anything actually lives outside water.
As the beneficiary of a neoliberal order that brought so many of us cheaper, higher quality white goods, highly skilled and cheap tradespeople and a profusion of good chain coffee shops I had little idea of the cost of all this borne by those who'd been to worse schools than me.
This was my world. Where we luxuriated in our advantages and told our 'inferiors' that they would be voting against their own interests if they chose to upset the applecart.
This blind spot seems contemptibly stupid at this point, but it played a significant role in convincing me that people could only have voted for Brexit and Trump because something weird had gone on behind the scenes.
Trump Russia and Cambridge Analytica saved me for the longest time from bothering to think about why many people might not much like the economic and social culture that just seemed natural to me and most of my contemporaries.
Prior trust in media institutions that positioned themselves as objective while subtly becoming less so.
I was just inclined to believe the NYT and The Guardian because I always had, while not noticing how they were changing from reflectors of events to participants in events. It took FOUR YEARS for me to realise that Trump had condemned the nazis of Charlottsville and that Joe Biden was incorrect - or possibly lying - when he said Trump hadn't.
Self image as a 'liberal' rather than a neutral observer of these claims that 'liberalism' and even 'democracy' were under attack from dark forces made it all feel personal.
It wasn't just oh, this is happening. It was uh oh, this is happening and it's going to harm people like me.
This is not an exhaustive list of personal reactions to Russiagate and Cambridge Analytica, rather some examples of what emerges from reflecting honestly about it. Part of an intentional practice to figure out whether I really am evidence-led or subject to the same biases and incentives of those I once considered to be 'enemies'.
It's made me understand the appeal of conspiracy theories in a less abstract way. To mock less and see better.
And to interpret the continued attempts to keep both of those narratives alive for what they are. Which is understandable reactions to a less controllable world than many of us would wish for. Excuses to avoid confronting the diversity of human desires and values.
* Did you notice the deliberate insertion of this stupid statement above?
'All we can do is update our beliefs when the weight (or lack) of evidence demands it'.
This is what every one of us thinks we're doing all the time. But we don't. We really aren't even doing it some of the time unless we understand the basics of epistemology. Instead, we rely on the heuristics that suit us.
In the case of Brexit and Trump coming out of the blue for many of us the heuristic that suited most of us was that;
Brexit and Trump are bad things and the people who brought them to pass are either bad people or stupid enough to have been tricked by some false stories and incorrect arguments secretly inserted into the public conversation by people who wish us harm.
All of the people around us think they're updating their beliefs on the basis of evidential weight or absence.
There was a vast amount of evidence presented for Russiagate and the malign success of Cambridge Analytica, but it turned out to be false evidence.
This is happening all the time. Arguments over false evidence.
The root cause of this seems to be poor general understanding of epistemology. Questions like what is evidence? Things we all think we know, but rarely exercise sufficient curiosity to examine.
Let's finish with two fascinating Scott Alexander pieces exposing how rare it is to be genuinely analytical in the way we approach figuring out what's real, as opposed to what suits us.
As Alexander muses at one point, this stuff is probably partly genetic, so it's extremely difficult to think about thinking, especially if you're invested in just getting to the end point without allowing pesky philosophical problems to intervene.
I still think Brexit was the wrong answer to the wrong question, but not the existential threat to all that is good about Britain that I once did. And I understand why those who voted for it did so. I've learned that Trump was ludicrously - and often falsely - maligned while also seeing his vulgarity, dishonesty and narcissism as deeply undesirable traits in a leader. And I understand why so many people who voted twice for Barack Obama ended up disappointed enough to vote for his antithesis.
Best of all, I understand why I believed in two really stupid conspiracy theories and that seems like a win to me.
If you're wondering why controversy over Scott Alexander's meta analyses of Ivermectin as a cure for Covid-19 is relevant to Trump Russia and Cambridge Analytica, all will become clear.
Finally, I’m very grateful for the traffic and new sign-ups that come particularly from the Substack network. Much of this flows from some very kind recommendations for Rarely Certain.
If you consistently enjoy this thing and have a Substack, please consider recommending Rarely Certain to your readers. It makes a real material difference.
Appreciate your honesty on this. I can't claim to have superior political acumen, but swimming ideologically upstream in many of the circles I move does give one a different perspective at least.
I found the #resistance hashtag both vainglorious and ridiculous. Even more ludicrous was #notmypresident from the same people who claim election deniers are villains.
Beyond just Brexit and Trump, the assumption in recent years that elections only go a particular way due to manipulation, fraud, other skulduggery, is really toxic. Because it removes any impetus to actually ask whether what your side is offering the voter is perhaps not working.
It is only by listening to the diverse opinions of others that you realise how little you really know and understand. This makes you think and question your own understanding of the world, which will inevitably lead to personal growth... and when it all gets too much; go birdwatching.