Donald Trump, Elon Musk and friends: Beware digital snake-oil salesmen

By Max Hastings

In the western Russian city of Kirov last month, citizens spoke out fiercely in defense of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine. Olga Akishina, whose boyfriend was killed by a US-supplied missile, denounced supposed “NATO bases in Ukraine” and the “extermination” of Russian speakers there.

A thrice-wounded army officer said: “The US and NATO gave us no choice….I’m going back [to fight] because I want my kids to be proud of me. You have to raise patriots. Otherwise Russia will be eaten up.”

These people, and more like them, were speaking to Washington Post reporters closely monitored by Kremlin officialdom, so it would be naïve to imagine that this was an exercise in free speech. But I see few signs of doubt that Putin’s war, which in its first months in 2022 bewildered and dismayed his people, now commands strong national support, as does his narrative of national victimhood, which may even be reinforced by Ukraine’s current incursion into Russia.

This represents, of course, a triumph for falsehood. The Kremlin’s master, like China’s President Xi Jinping, sustains such rigorous control of all broadcast and print outlets, together with social media, that every voice of dissent is stifled ruthlessly and effectively.

All this, and much else around the world, confounds the dream that we were all invited to share 25 or 30 years ago, when the internet was in its infancy. This supreme tool for the dissemination of knowledge and increase of understanding, said the experts and prophets, augured the doom of dictatorships. Their peoples would enjoy unchallengeable online access to truth, such as they had historically been denied. The Big Lie would become unsustainable.

In reality, of course, dictators have devised systems, deploying unprecedented armories for electronic surveillance, which shut out almost all information from what American propagandists once called “the Free World.”

Yet many of us find the truth desert in Russia, China, Iran, North Korea less frightening than the similar environment occupying swaths of the West, and most conspicuously the US. I wrote for Bloomberg four years ago about academic studies showing that Americans, members of the richest and most successful society on earth, are more willing to swallow falsehoods and conspiracy theories than any other Western people.

This gullibility constitutes a major strategic vulnerability. It has since grown worse, as tens of millions of US voters embrace Donald Trump and JD Vance, whose untruths might yet empower them to govern our greatest democracy. We shouldn’t forget that Trump in 2011 became one of the most foremost advocates of “birtherism” — the claim that Barack Obama wasn’t rightfully an American. A 2010 opinion poll showed that a quarter of all Americans claimed to harbor doubts about the then-president’s origins, untroubled by the absence of evidence.

Elon Musk’s X (once known as Twitter) has become one of the principal vehicles for disseminating far-right lies, a source of alarm to counter-terrorism authorities. Musk himself, reveling in possession of power such as few national governments can match, lies prodigiously on his own account. Peter Thiel uses his PayPal billions as a club to silence critics and to denounce the alleged evils of democracy.

It has become a cliché to shrug that we now inhabit “the post-truth age.” But we shouldn’t idealize the past. In the pre-post-truth age, which covered everything from the dawn of time, kings and priests, then politicians, lied to their peoples. FDR lied. John F. Kennedy lied. Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon lied prodigiously, and so too did Ronald Reagan — remember the Iran-Contra scandal?

What seems different now is that the deceits peddled by Trump and his acolytes are designed to destroy trust not merely in their Democratic opponents, but in the principal institutions of the US and, especially, of its instruments of justice. They reject the doctrine of moderation, the fundamental reality — which most of us have been educated to take for granted — that wisdom is chiefly to be found in the middle ground.

We in the mainstream media face constant pressure, in the name of “balance,” to grant equal time to those pitching such snake oil, as to those rehearsing evidence-based narratives.

An important element in the rise of populists around the world is the willingness of their leaders to legitimize nonsense doctrines that find favor among ignorant people, in opposition to the hated elites.

One such said at a rally of his followers, in which he spoke of the “miraculousness” of the gathering: “Not every one of you can see me, and I cannot see every one of you. Yet I feel you, and you feel me! It is the faith in our people that made us small people great, and that made us poor people rich, that has given courage to us wavering, discouraged, fearful people.”

This could be a snatch from a speech by any of the many populist leaders on both sides of the Atlantic. In truth, however, these were the words of the 1936 leader of Germany. Hitler convinced his followers, the little people, those who thought themselves powerless against the powers-that-be, that he was on their side, the outsider against the insiders. His lies made them feel good, just as the lies of Trump and Vance make their supporters feel good today.

The supremacy of elites was by no means necessarily a formula for good government: The journalist David Halberstam gave his great 1972 book on how America got into Vietnam the ironic title The Best and the Brightest. The folks who led the way into that quagmire — and lied about it —were some of the smartest people in the country.

But in every Western society, people need to relearn the art of thinking for themselves; recognizing in every action and decision of their daily lives that most of the stuff they see online is at best unedited, unproven; is often willful falsehood. If we go on uncritically swallowing what we see on social media, or that we hear from snake-oil salesmen, we are headed for a very bad place indeed.