"Narrative Crash"

 

I remember a quote from Goebbels the Nazi propaganda minister "Put 1 part truth and 2 part lie in a statement, it makes the total lie easy to swallow.  And in my mind, that is what the left does, they put a kernel of truth in their statement and build a whole narrative around it making it easy to push it through friendly news outlets and influencers and other gatekeepers of the media industrial complex.

There is an old rule of politics that deserves to be carved in granite above every newsroom, faculty lounge, and activist headquarters in the Western world: never let facts get in the way of a perfectly good narrative. If recent years have taught us anything, it is that many of our institutions have become less interested in discovering the truth than in selecting it. Increasingly, events are not examined to determine what happened. They are examined to determine how they can be made to fit an existing ideological framework. Once the framework is established, facts become optional accessories, useful if they support the narrative and disposable if they do not.

If you are paying attention, you are watching some of the global left’s favorite narrative streams fall apart in real time. The problem is not that they occasionally get things wrong, it is that the mistakes seem remarkably consistent. The errors almost always lean in the same direction, reinforce the same assumptions, flatter the same worldview, and advance the same political objectives. After a while, coincidence begins to look suspiciously like a business model.

Consider Canada’s residential-school “mass graves” scandal. For a brief period, the story became an international sensation. Headlines and politicians alike spoke as though thousands of murdered Indigenous children had been discovered in hidden burial grounds, evidence of a national crime so monstrous that it demanded a collective reckoning. Churches were vandalized and burned. Public officials issued apologies. Entire institutions were condemned. Yet beneath the tidal wave of certainty was a rather inconvenient detail: no mass graves had actually been found. Ground-penetrating radar had identified anomalies beneath the soil. Such anomalies may indicate graves, but they may also indicate rocks, roots, or other disturbances. Excavation and forensic verification were required before conclusions could be drawn. The narrative, however, could not wait for something as mundane as evidence.

The accusation had already served its purpose.

I think Nancy Pelosi called it a “wrap-up smear.”

A similar pattern emerged recently in Britain with the death of Henry Nowak. Initial reporting focused heavily on allegations that Nowak had uttered a racial slur. The implication was unmistakable. The public was invited to view the story through the familiar lens of hate speech and prejudice. The fact that Nowak had been stabbed and was bleeding to death while police restrained him seemed almost secondary. Subsequent reporting cast doubt on whether the alleged slur had occurred at all, but by then the narrative machinery had already done its work. The public had been instructed on what lesson to take away from the event long before all the facts were known.

This pattern is hardly confined to those two examples. Americans will remember Jussie Smollett, whose alleged hate-crime victimhood became a national symbol of racial and political tensions before investigators concluded that the attack itself had apparently been fabricated. They may remember Covington Catholic, where a few carefully selected seconds of video transformed a group of Kentucky teenagers into national villains before fuller footage revealed a far more complicated reality. They may recall how questioning whether COVID originated in a laboratory was once treated as evidence of dangerous conspiracy thinking, only to watch that same possibility later become a legitimate subject of scientific and governmental investigation. In each case, certainty arrived first and evidence wandered in much later looking confused and underdressed.

What makes these episodes remarkable is not merely that the narratives collapsed. Narratives have always collapsed. The remarkable thing is that virtually nobody responsible ever seems to suffer any consequences. The journalists who promoted the story remain journalists. The experts remain experts. The politicians remain politicians. The activists remain activists. The correction receives a fraction of the attention devoted to the original claim, and then everyone proceeds to the next moral emergency as though nothing happened. There is never a serious accounting of how the mistake occurred, why basic skepticism was abandoned, or what safeguards might prevent a recurrence. The institutional memory appears to last approximately as long as a mayfly.

The late H. L. Mencken famously observed that the aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. One suspects he would find modern politics both familiar and deeply amusing. Our hobgoblins are now distributed globally, amplified electronically, and repeated continuously by institutions that increasingly resemble advocacy organizations wearing the borrowed clothing of objective inquiry. Every week presents a new crisis, a new villain, a new demand that the public suspend judgment and place its trust in authorities who seem to have misplaced theirs.

Yet reality remains stubborn. It is the great enemy of ideological storytelling because it possesses no loyalty to political tribes. Facts have an irritating tendency to survive contact with narratives. They refuse to stay buried, no matter how much effort is devoted to shoveling dirt on top of them. They resurface months or years later, often after reputations have been destroyed, institutions have been damaged, and public trust has been squandered.

Perhaps that is why confidence in so many of our major institutions continues to decline. People are not losing trust because institutions occasionally make mistakes. They are losing trust because the mistakes increasingly appear to be motivated, predictable, and protected. Citizens can forgive honest error. What they find much harder to forgive is the growing suspicion that many of the people charged with informing the public have decided that persuasion is more important than truth.

The truth, unfortunately for them, is a difficult thing to suppress permanently. It may take its time, but time is a narrative’s worse enemy. While it may arrive late and not generate headlines as dramatic as the original accusation, eventually it does show up.

When it does, it usually finds the architects of the narrative already searching for the next one.