I’ve had it up to my wiggling ears with “conspiracy theories,” the media’s current attempt to engage a mostly disinterested public.
The cancellation of late-night TV “comedian” Stephen Colbert’s show (but not until next May; if CBS believed he was such a detriment, why didn’t they tell Mr. Vaxxer to clear out his desk last week, eat his contract and let go the enormous staff? ) has, as usual, pitted conservatives against liberals. The former believe he was canned for low ratings, production costs and a limited range of TDS-topics. The latter say it’s CBS (owned by Paramount) caving into pressure from the Trump administration, one more “existential threat” to the “American Experiment” and the First Amendment.
It’s a non-issue: private sector companies terminate people every day—even those like Colbert, whose reported salary is $15 million—and it doesn’t rate much notoriety. Maybe Paramount was taking a prophylactic approach by appeasing Trump, who sues individuals and corporations before he applies Colgate to his teeth each morning; maybe it was exercising fiduciary responsibility, figuring a tired “comic” whose TV show costs $100 million to produce each year wasn’t worth the investment.
Colbert, unless he has a storefront accountant, is set financially, and maybe some other outfit—Netflix is mentioned—will pick up his act. But in another week, the disproportionate coverage of his cancellation will fall into the “So What? Who Cares? file of American pop culture. I’m not sure why conservatives are so excited about it: no one’s forcing them to watch Colbert (or read The New York Times, for that matter), but collecting the scalps of Democratic operatives is important. Not to me, since I watch baseball games and British/Irish mysteries on TV, and that’s about it.
I do, on the other hand, find it ludicrous that the left’s #7 Outrage is that Trump’s team says they’ll force college students to pay back loans. This one’s beyond belief: you borrow money, you make good on the debt. Why is that hard to understand? I have a small mortgage on our house and wouldn’t expect the lender to tell me, “Hey, it’s okay to let it slide.”
There was a smart, if hardly contentious, “Guest Essay” in the Times last week by Matthew Walther (editor of The Lamp, a Catholic journal), who calmly debunked a lot of the conspiracy nonsense today, starting with the Epstein Files. He writes: “Donald Trump’s political obituary has been written more times than anyone could hope to count without the resources of a large data processing center. [I’m assuming the lame joke about the “data processing center” was inserted by a gotta-keep-busy Times underling, who might be unceremoniously cancelled one of these days, not that anyone but his or her family would know.] The “Access Hollywood” tape in 2016, impeachments in in 2019 and 2021, the specter of Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2022, a conviction on felony crimes last year: In these and many other instances, reports of Mr. Trump’s political demise have been greatly, perhaps even desperately, exaggerated.”
Walther reminds attention-span-of-a-gnat readers that Bill Clinton (death of Vince Foster, drug smuggling), George W. Bush “stealing” the 2004 election, Barack Obama’s citizenship (and now his alleged electoral interference in 2016), and Trump as “Kremlin asset” were all “conspiracies” that came and went, except for obsessives. Granted, the “obsessives” make a lot of noise on social media, which isn’t insignificant, but I think more Americans are pissed about Halloween decorations and candy hogging space at supermarkets in July than Russiagate or Stephen Colbert.
I’m mildly curious about the “Epstein list” and why Trump, who promised during the campaign that its contents would go public, hasn’t kept his word (ignoring “promises” is second-nature to him). Maybe a new international trading partner is implicated, maybe Jared Kushner got a high school girl on the side, who knows. And GOP critics are correct in pointing out that Biden’s rag-tag team never disclosed the list of alleged pedophiles: so there’s potential embarrassment on all sides of the “elite” world. At this point I doubt anyone would be stunned by any revelations: it’s just disposable, if for-a-minute-salacious entertainment. Or “infotainment”: I can’t keep up.
Conspiracy theories aren’t often worth the bother. For instance, in the 1970s, millions wondered who “Deep Throat” was in the Watergate scandal. I wanted to know, but years later (2005) when it turned out to be Mark Felt, a disgruntled FBI official, you could hear the yawns around the country.
The assassination of JFK is far more substantial, but after almost a lifetime of bandying about the culprits (almost no one believed it was Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone) my interest has waned. Was it LBJ? The mob? CIA? All plausible, but if the question’s answered, it won’t come as a surprise: more on the order of “The Deep State. That makes sense. Anyway, what time is Saturday’s Red Sox-Yankees game?” That’s cynical, I guess, but who isn’t cynical today about anything associated with the federal (and local) government? Younger people with an acute interest in history, like my kids, would relish, and chew over, an ironclad explanation of what led up to, and happened in Dallas in 1963. But, tuckered out, I’ll pass the baton.
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023