08 Jun Know Your Customer, Redux
Yesterday, Matt Taibbi posted to his Substack a new piece on the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline. Taibbi – the erstwhile darling and current bane of the Gen-X Left – thinks that events and discussions surrounding the attacks on the pipeline demonstrate clearly and inarguably that the American government is staffed by blatant and unapologetic liars:
The Kakhovka dam just exploded in Ukraine, flooding a huge territory and causing another insane ecological disaster. Russia and Ukraine spent yesterday trading accusations, while the U.S. leaked it was “leaning towards Russia as the culprit of the attack.” The synchronicity was uncanny, with the media’s dam freakout coming exactly as public panic about the previous lunatic infrastructure attack came full circle, moving from certainty Russia blew up the Nord Stream pipeline to belated claims we knew all along Ukraine did it. It’s as if officials want the world to take American intelligence assessments more as Gilbert Gottfried routines than truth.
At 10:52 a.m. yesterday, the Washington Post published an exclusive called, “U.S. had intelligence of detailed Ukrainian plan to attack Nord Stream pipeline.” The story contended the United States learned from a “European intelligence service” in June, 2022 that Ukraine was planning a “covert attack” on Nord Stream, using divers who “reported directly to the commander in chief of the Ukrainian armed forces,” General Valery Zaluzhny. Apparently, U.S. and European allies knew about the Ukrainian plan and were impotent to stop a move they worried “risked a severe Russian response.”
The only people in the country who didn’t roll eyes or laugh at these latest anonymous contortions were reporters….
The Nord Stream narrative has now gone from “No one thinks anyone but Russia did it” to “It’s a mystery!” to “There’s no evidence Russia did it” to “pro-Ukraine saboteurs may have done it” to “The U.S. and its allies have known for nearly a year Kyiv did it, but said otherwise the whole time.” What are we supposed to think next time officials make statements after a disaster? Are we supposed to forget all this background?
As best we can tell, one of three things is going on here. The first possibility is one suggested by Taibbi himself:
Specialists in “anti-disinformation” insist a goal of foreign fake news artists is to assault the reasoning process itself, making populations distrust once-reliable sources, leaving them susceptible to conspiracy theories. If that’s true, how is it not provably the case that domestic officials are playing the same game, moving goalposts on everything from the origin of the coronavirus to vaccine efficacy to Nord Stream?
In other words, this is all part of a psyop against the American people, managed by the American government, a truly horrifying idea – and one that we’ll admit crossed our minds as well.
The second possible explanation is that the American officials responsible for constantly shifting stories on Nord Stream (and other issues) are simply dumb – and worse yet, they assume that we are as well. Taibbi asks “Are we supposed to forget all this background?” Well…yeah. That’s kinda what they’re expecting. They say whatever fits the narrative at the time, with exactly zero concern for how it might look in the face of evidence. When the narrative changes, they say something else, with exactly zero concern for the contradictions between their statements. And they expect that we’ll all just nod along, never questioning what they’re saying or why it matters.
The third and, in our opinion, the most likely explanation is a variation on yesterday’s theme, “know your customer.” The American officials who blatantly and unapologetically lie do so specifically in the service of crafting a narrative. They know what their supporters believe in general. They know what their supporters want to believe in specific instances. And they know what they have to say to make the two mesh.
Last September, when the pipeline was destroyed, American officials knew that their supporters wanted to believe the worst about Putin but were not yet convinced to believe the best about Zelensky and Ukraine. So, they chose purposefully to lie about the story in order to reinforce the narrative and reinforce their supporters’ belief in it. “the Russians did it!” “Well…of course they did. And they would, wouldn’t they?”
When that narrative began to crumble under the weight of the evidence, the officials changed their story, but did so in keeping with their supporters’ expressed preferences. They suggested that, perhaps, there was evidence that their own side, the U.S. government, was involved in destroying Nord Stream. “Look at how daring and forcefully Biden is willing to take this fight to Putin! Get ‘em, Joe!”
Today, with the narrative crumbling again, they concede something close to the truth, knowing that it doesn’t matter. Their supporters don’t care about Nord Stream any longer. “Old news,” they say. “Let’s find out who blew up the dam instead!”
Team Biden knows its customers.
And it’s hardly alone.
For months now, the Republicans on the House Oversight Committee have told the American people that they have “iron-clad” evidence that Joe Biden and his family were clearly and inarguably involved in an international bribery scandal that would not only bring the Bidens down but would also make the Clintons blush. When it came time to put up or shut up, they published and hyped a report indicating that “circumstantial” evidence linked the Bidens to a bribery scheme. Next, there was a whistleblower charge that the FBI was keeping from them because it would blow the whole lid off the bribery scandal and would destroy the Bidens once and for all. And then the FBI said, well…OK…you can look at our report. And it turns out to be about a guy who told an informant that he has evidence that he paid Hunter AND Joe Biden bribes, but – naturally – no one has seen that evidence, or likely ever will.
House Republicans, in short, know their audience too. They know that they can say whatever they want about Joe Biden and their supporters will believe it. They know that when the narrative begins to crumble, they too can simply alter that narrative without sacrificing their credibility because their customers have already been drawn in and won’t ever change the beliefs that they have formed and know, in their heart of hearts, are true, irrespective of the evidence.
Longtime readers may recall that we have expressed our frustration with this type of hyperbolic, dishonest “customer care” on the part of our political class and its media sycophants many times over the last few years. From the Russian collusion hoax to the stolen election nonsense; from the Sidney Powell and Lin Woods pronouncements of inarguable proof of vote tampering to the insistence that John Durham was “closing in” on Clinton campaign and Obama government officials who defrauded the American electorate; Americans are, more and more, governed by people who appear intentionally and relentlessly to manipulate the truth in order to build false narratives that play upon the sympathies of their political supporters.
That all of this is tiresome goes without saying. But it’s worse than that. This is, inarguably, contributing to the polarization of the country and the consequent division of it into “friend” and “enemy” groups. This, we suppose, is the dark side of “knowing your customers,” i.e. knowing them well enough to manipulate them into certain beliefs that are at odds with reality and that put them at odds with their fellow countrymen.
