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How ‘Misinformation’ Becomes Common Knowledge Timur Kuran
How did something considered misinformation on Thursday afternoon become common knowledge by Thursday night?
The social mechanism that converts supposed misinformation into consensus is a topic that I have studied for many years. It involves something ubiquitous: the twin acts of misrepresenting what we know and what we want under perceived social pressures. As I explained in my book, Private Truths, Public Lies, such expressions of insincerity can do serious harm. The Biden-Trump debate and its aftermath provide a powerful case in point. Allow me to explain.
Until Thursday night’s CNN debate, a majority of Democrats were afraid to tell a basic truth in public—to say openly what they know about Joe Biden’s physical and mental health—for fear of emboldening Donald Trump or taking a position that may seem adverse to their party. So they kept their knowledge of his declining cognitive abilities private and, in public, conveyed impressions and issued reports at odds with their own senses.
If they felt that a different candidate had a higher chance of beating Trump, with rare exception they kept that preference hidden and pretended to agree with the idea, repeated ad infinitum, that Biden remained the party’s best hope.
Preference and Knowledge Falsification
Why did they do this? Fear. Fear, in this case, of being punished by their fellow Democrats.
Fear of being punished by a crowd is not unique to Democrats, or liberals, or Americans. It is an innate human response to the dangers of being ostracized, to being cut off from friendships and privileges that are critical to survival. We are born with a need for social acceptance. That need is what drives knowledge falsification and preference falsification.
Each of these—misrepresenting what you know and what you prefer—is a special form of lying. Most “in the know” Democrats engaged in both over the past few years: knowledge falsification about Biden’s decline and preference falsification about whether he should be the party’s nominee.
So even as hardly a day passed without new video clips showing a disoriented and frail Biden, Democrats, aided by swaths of left-leaning media, rushed to dismiss the clips as taken out of context, or as misleading because of the cameraman’s perspective, or as malicious misinformation. They would also vilify the producers and spreaders of the videos as MAGA villains out to destroy democracy. In no uncertain terms, qualms about Biden’s age or cognitive capacity were treated as unwelcome, even as a betrayal of democracy itself.
Those Democrats who refused to lie about what they knew once they knew it—people like Dean Phillips and, much later, Ezra Klein—surely sensed that Biden’s condition could not remain a secret forever. And they worried that, should the news spread before Election Day, he could lose votes essential to winning. Better to preempt that eventuality, they argued, by picking a younger candidate while time remains for him or her to gain national name recognition. If the stakes are democracy, could there be any other choice?
But the Biden campaign would have none of it. Talk of replacing Biden was regarded as irresponsible, meant to push away voters Democrats need— and, they argued, it would facilitate Trump’s return. Insiders also brought up—more commonly in private conversations than in public settings—an obstacle to getting the party to unite around an alternative nominee. Were Biden to bow out, Vice President Kamala Harris might create an even bigger problem. Despite her low approval ratings, she would likely insist on moving to the top of the ticket. Other candidates could emerge, triggering accusations of racism and sexism, fracturing the party. Whatever the resolution, the infighting would cause epic Democratic losses up and down the ballot.
And so, for the first half of 2024, the majority of Democrats who favored Biden’s retirement kept their preferences private.
A Trap of Their Own Making
As signs of Biden’s diminished mental acuity mounted, knowledge and preference falsification trapped Democratic elites. Though few implored Biden to step aside in the months and weeks before the CNN debate, Democratic officeholders and an overwhelming majority of Democratic journalists maintained a facade of unity. To individual doubters, this unity posed an insurmountable obstacle to speaking truthfully. It meant that they were likely to face accusations of betrayal alone, possibly even without backing from friends. Although the private doubters of nominating Biden may have had the edge numerically against his genuine supporters, the doubters had no way to mobilize. Because they kept their private truths hidden, they could not even find each other, much less coordinate their actions and form an effective anti-Biden coalition.
Knowledge and preference falsification can do far more damage than mere self-censorship. In this case, Democrats close to Biden, and thereby “in the know,” deliberately misled their fellow Democrats into thinking that chatter about Biden’s deterioration was merely propaganda orchestrated by Republicans and their allies. They circulated cherry-picked videos of choreographed events as ostensible proof that Biden was as sharp as ever. In March, they proclaimed that Biden’s State of the Union address, in which he read a prepared speech from a teleprompter, should put to rest questions about his fitness.
Knowledge and preference falsification pollute the bodies of information that individuals use in developing their understandings of the world and their rankings among options. They misinform the polity about what is known and preferred. They conceal feasible options. They obscure the extent of support for changing direction. In fostering a culture of mendacity, they hinder the identification of discontent and compound the difficulties of forming coalitions among people eager to switch course.
The Trap Shatters
The self-imposed Democratic trap shattered in the first few minutes of the CNN debate. Posts on X and calls from horrified Democrats set off an open national conversation. Long-apprehensive Democratic-aligned journalists, officeholders, and other influential party members finally found in themselves the courage to voice what they have known and wanted, but suppressed.
As Biden spoke incoherently, his debility became common knowledge. Suddenly everyone knew—and everyone knew that everyone knew. Because tens of millions of Americans were watching, every viewer understood that all other viewers, whatever their political biases, were witnessing the same thing. No amount of spin could overcome what we were seeing with our own eyes.
The trap’s collapse made fear among many Democratic elites flip sides. Their predominant pre-debate fear of signaling reservations about Biden’s candidacy gave way to an ascendant and now-dominant fear of continuing to endorse the approved narrative.
But by no means were the Democratic opinion leaders who exploded in horror after the debate alone in initiating a national conversation on Biden’s candidacy. The Democratic rank-and-file played a critical role in pressuring elites to start saying what they had known long before the debate.
Most Americans are detached from the twists and turns of daily news cycles. They tune in only during major crises and elections. So to many of these Democratic voters, Biden’s performance came as a genuine shock.
We will never know whether Democratic elites would have dismantled their self-destructive trap without a flood of honest reactions from the Democratic rank-and-file. The president’s performance was so disastrous that it might have been sufficient to drive enough elites to their boiling points to start a cascade of truthfulness among themselves.
It may have made all the difference that a huge national audience watched the debate live. If the debate had not been televised, with only the press witnessing it, reporters might have been able to spin the exchange as a win for Biden by focusing on Trump’s wild exaggerations and his non-answers, along with some Biden mini-quotes that seem coherent on paper. In other words, the out-in-the-open, live nature of the debate may have been critical to generating the common knowledge of Biden’s current state.
One thing is certain: the discovery by Democratic elites of Biden’s deterioration on Thursday night was mostly feigned. Individually and collectively, they chose not to convey truthfully what they knew or what decisions they considered necessary for electoral success. They knew. But like many human beings faced with the consequences of telling the truth, they opted to misinform.
Timur Kuran is a professor of economics and political science at Duke University. He is also the author of many books, including the seminal Private Truths, Public Lies. Follow him on X @timurkuran.
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I have spent the weekend struggling mightily with a new manuscript and have had little time to study the news.
The most notable event from the day is that in a stunning upset, French voters have rejected members of Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party in legislative elections. After the first round of votes, National Rally candidates appeared to be comfortably ahead, but left-wing and centrist candidates combined forces to prevent splitting the vote, and voters then flooded the polls to elect the candidates that coalition fielded.
Le Pen has said her policies are the same ones advanced by Russian president Vladimir Putin and former president Trump.
On Thursday, elections in the United Kingdom saw a landslide victory for the center-left Labour Party for the first time in 14 years. Lauren Frayer and Fatima Al-Kassab of NPR noted that it was the worst defeat for the Conservatives in their almost 200-year history.
There are always many factors that go into any election, but these results at least raise the question of whether western politicians are finding effective ways to counter the techniques of Russian disinformation. France has been flooded with Russian disinformation trying to create divisions in society as Putin seeks to break European support for Ukraine. Russia openly supports Le Pen.
The U.K. also has been similarly flooded with Russian disinformation for years now. Russian trolls lie on social media websites and populate the comments sections of popular websites both to end support for Ukraine and to exploit wedge issues to split people apart.
These efforts were part of what Russian political theorists called “political technology”: the construction of a virtual political reality through modern media. Political theorists developed several techniques in this approach to politics: blackmailing opponents, abusing state power to help favored candidates, sponsoring “double” candidates with names similar to those of opponents in order to confuse voters on the other side and thus open the way for their own candidates, creating false parties to split the opposition, and, finally, creating a false narrative around an election or other event in order to control public debate.
These techniques perverted democracy, turning it from the concept of voters choosing their leaders into the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.
This system made sense in former Soviet republics, where it enabled leaders to avoid the censorship that voters would recoil from by instead creating a firehose of news until people became overwhelmed by the task of trying to figure out what was real and simply tuned out. But those techniques dovetailed with the rhetoric of homegrown far-right figures as well.
It has always been a question what people who have embraced a virtual world will do when they figure out that the narrative on which they have based their government is fake. It seems possible that they create centrist coalitions and turn out to vote in huge numbers to reassert control over their politics and their country.
The United States has had a similarly contentious relationship with political technology, Russian disinformation, and far-right leaders echoing that disinformation as they seek to take power by dividing the American people.
And long before anyone had begun to call disinformation political technology, the United States had a small group of elite enslavers seeking to take control of the nation by hammering on their narrative that the only true basis for society was racial slavery and using racism to divide their opponents.
When they managed to get Congress and the Supreme Court to give them the right to move slavery into the American West, where new slave states could work with southern slave states to make slavery national, voters woke up. Disagreeing about immigration, internal improvements, public education, tariffs, and finance—all hot-button issues in the 1850s—they nonetheless built a centrist coalition to stop elite enslavers from replacing democracy with an oligarchy.
Indeed, their coalition was so effective that Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas, who had sponsored the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act that permitted enslavement to move west, objected that it was unseemly for abolitionists who opposed human enslavement in principle to work with those like Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln, who focused on the Constitution and argued that it protected enslavement in the slave states.
In 1854, Lincoln answered Douglas: “Our Senator…objects that those who oppose him in this measure do not entirely agree with one another…. [H]e…says it is not quite fair to oppose him in this variety of ways. He should remember that he took us by surprise—astounded us—by this measure. We were thunderstruck and stunned; and we reeled and fell in utter confusion. But we rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher’s cleaver. We struck in the direction of the sound; and we are rapidly closing in upon him. He must not think to divert us from our purpose, by showing us that our drill, our dress, and our weapons, are not entirely perfect and uniform. When the storm shall be past, he shall find us still Americans; no less devoted to the continued Union and prosperity of the country than heretofore.”
Six years later, that coalition of voters elected Lincoln to the White House.
The French elections left no party in an absolute majority, so governance will be messy. Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez nonetheless cheered tonight’s results: “This week, two of the largest countries in Europe have chosen the same path that Spain chose a year ago: rejection of the extreme right and a decisive commitment to a social left that addresses people’s problems with serious and brave policies,” Sánchez posted on social media.
“The United Kingdom and France have said YES to progress and social advancement and NO to the regression in rights and freedoms. There is no agreement or government with the extreme right.”
Notes:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/07/07/france-election-result-2024-left-far-right/
https://www.npr.org/2024/07/05/g-s1-8456/uk-labour-party-win-keir-starmer
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/12/30/france-russia-interference-far-right/
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/virtual-politics-and-the-corruption-post-soviet-democracy
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/interview/gleb-pavlovsky/
https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/peoriaspeech.htm
https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/france-election-runoff-results-07-07-24-intl/index.html
X:
NoLieWithBTC/status/1810085577397608770
anneapplebaum/status/1810013990447092150
GORDES, FRANCE — On Saturday night, I was at a birthday party here, in Provence, and everyone was asking everyone else whether they planned to vote fascist in Sunday’s election. Most of the attendees were Jews.
They were being a tad ironic. They don’t think the current incarnation of the National Rally party is actually fascist. No swastikas. No goose-stepping.
But the party is fascist-adjacent. It’s the direct descendant of fascists: the National Rally (formerly known as the National Front) is run by Marine Le Pen, the daughter of the late Jean-Marie Le Pen, who founded the National Front in 1972 and hated Jews. (Among other Le Pen lowlights is this 1987 quip: “I’m not saying the gas chambers didn’t exist. I haven’t seen them myself. I haven’t particularly studied the question. But I believe it’s just a detail in the history of World War II.”)
But that was then. And now? Well, now the “fascists” and the Jews are bound together by a common foe: radical Islam, which has cut a gaping hole through the French body politic.
Now, the French far right and many of the country’s 500,000 Jews believe that they are under siege, and that unless something radical changes, France will soon be lost forever.
Has the reason for Joe Biden’s obvious physical and mental decline been hiding in plain sight? Two July 6 reports suggest the president has been seeing a Parkinson’s disease specialist for months.
On Saturday, the New York Post reported that a doctor at Walter Reed Medical Center with expertise in Parkinson’s visited the White House January 17, hosted by the president’s physician Kevin O’Connor. A second report, published by Alex Berenson on his Substack, Unreported Truths, revealed that the doctor visited the White House nine times between July 28, 2023, and March 28, 2024. (The logs run through March 31, 2024, and are available for anyone to access online.)
The doctor in question is Kevin R. Cannard, a neurologist and retired Army colonel. His physician profile page shows he is a neurologist and movement disorders specialist at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center who researches treatments for early phase Parkinson’s disease. Berenson notes that Walter Reed “provides medical care to senior federal officials.”
If Cannard is treating Biden, then the president has some explaining to do. Last Friday, during a televised interview designed to do damage control after his disastrous debate performance the week before, Biden was asked several times if he would submit to a complete neurological and cognitive exam done by independent physicians. (The Free Press called for such an evaluation last week.)
Biden, 81, repeatedly demurred. “Look, I have a cognitive test every single day,” he said, referring to his performing the duties of the presidency. He also said, apparently referring to his physicians, “No one said I had to. No one said. They said I’m good.”
Whenever Biden has been pressed about his fitness for the White House, he’s often responded with a favorite catchphrase, “Watch me.” But the public has been watching—with increasing alarm. Neurologists, who generally wish to remain anonymous, have been watching, too.
One, an emeritus professor of neurology who has not treated the president, told The Free Press he believes Biden “has Parkinsonism, an umbrella term that refers to neurologic conditions that cause slowed movements, rigidity, and tremors. By observation, he has a masked face, reduced blinking, stiff and slow gait, hunched posture, low-volume voice, imbalance, freezing, mild cognitive disturbance, and difficulty turning.”
Another neurologist, who wrote to Berenson after his story was published, echoed these findings: “All the disturbing symptoms we all see are called Parkinsonism. . . . In fact in medical school we watch videos of patients with Parkinsonism like Biden to illustrate to the students how this manifests.”
Coincidentally, just last week, Biden signed into law the National Plan to End Parkinson’s Act, which promises to “dramatically increase federal research funding, develop more effective pathways for treatments and cures,” and “improve early diagnosis” of the disease.
According to the results of a physical exam released in February, O’Connor declared Biden “fit to successfully execute the duties of the presidency,” adding that there are “no findings which would be consistent” with Parkinson’s.
If Cannard has examined the president and agrees with this, he should say so publicly.
It is also incumbent on the administration to explain Cannard’s multiple visits. If this neurologist has diagnosed and is treating Biden for a form of Parkinsonism—and this has been covered up—that’s a medical and political scandal. If his doctors believe he has this disease and are failing to inform and treat him, that is shocking malpractice. (House Republicans have already requested an interview with O’Connor.)
And let’s say Cannard is just an old-fashioned doctor who makes house calls to the White House to see patients other than the president. If that’s true, the public needs to know this, too.
Biden may say there is no necessity for him to get that comprehensive evaluation. But he’s wrong. The American people deserve to know what’s going on with the president.
Emily Yoffe is a senior editor at The Free Press. You can follow her on X at @emilyyoffe.
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