UPDATE: see bottom.
I am here (apparently not alone) as a refugee from DailyKos, having been a member there from November of ’04 til a few weeks ago, when I was banned for posting a diary that proposed a series questioning the official 9/11 conspiracy theory. Of course I knew that unofficial conspiracy theory (uCT) diaries were forbidden at Dkos, but I thought the time had come to employ the analytic capacity of that community to the subject.
Why did I think that time had come? Because of a widely recommended diary by thereisnospoon, that reached the following conclusion:
The lesson to learn is this: every time we think it just couldn’t get worse, it DOES. Every time we think an idea would be too out of bounds for these criminals, it isn’t. Almost every time we pooh-pooh a tin-foil hat idea on the grounds of impracticality, it turns out to be true in one way or another.
It’s time from now on to ASSUME THE WORST. It’s time to respect the tin-foil–because those brainwaves are turning out to be real every single time.
And it’s time to ask the most provocative questions possible (e.g., “well, if no WOMEN were being used for prostitution purposes at the Watergate, what about MEN?”).
Because every time we’ve tried to plumb the depths of the criminality of this administration, we find that we simply haven’t dug deep enough. So keep digging, and keep asking the scary questions–even if the answers seem outlandish, improbable, or even impossible. Because it’s probably true.
Of course it’s no stretch at all to imagine 9/11 in the scary questions category (of course, not as scary as the prospect of MALE prostitutes, but still.). And as spoon’s diary was widely recommended, I thought I’d put its concluding exhortation into practice.
But this isn’t a diary about how I – a trusted user! – was unjustly banned from Dkos (except in so far as that injustice serves to exemplify a general pattern). Nor is it a 9/11 uCT diary. Rather, I mean to draw attention to the fact that, as is likely the case regarding election fraud, the opinion of a large majority of kossacks concerning 9/11 is not only silenced, but stigmatized and effectively rendered invisible.
Those of you who frequent Dkos might have noticed that whenever a poll meant to register popular opinion of the official 9/11 narrative is posted, the results invariably show a large majority disbelieve it. These unscientific results gain some credibility in light of the recent Zogby poll showing that 42% of Americans in general, and 63% of self-identified liberals, mistrust the report produced by the 9/11 Commission. If 63% of liberals in general don’t trust the official story, I think it’s safe to regard the percentage of kossacks as significantly higher. (Based on the polls I’ve seen, I estimate skeptics of the official story to be ~75%.) Yet at Dkos, the opinion of the overwhelming majority is routinely stigmatized as the delusions of a lunatic fringe.
This stigmatization is necessary in order to reconcile the highly managed nature of the community with the pretense of Dkos as exemplar of the leaderless Netroots. Take this comment by Plutonium Page, in response to someone posting to a 9/11 uCT diary:
How’d you hear about dailyKos? Was it in the context of 9/11 “questions”, as in, “that’s a great place to discuss the 9/11 ‘questions’,”?I just wonder how the 9/11 CT folks find dailyKos.
This comment opened a door of understanding for me, in its implication that “9/11 CT folks” were a foreign element within the Dkos community, rather than the great majority of the community itself. Kos’ practice of banning users who transgress the limits he sets maintains this illusion. Those who speak out are banished, and the majority is silenced.
A similar thing happens in our culture generally, regarding so-called liberal values. Most people, for example, want some sort of universal health care system, yet the idea is treated in Washington as too radical to consider. We’re too busy, after all, fighting the war on terror. This disconnect between popular sentiment and official policy is the gate Kos means to crash.
Of course, it’s always easier to be a populist when you’re on the outside. Though ‘we,’ as a nation, seek to create liberal democracies elsewhere, within our own country liberal is a dirty word. A liberal is a person you can’t trust to be faithful to the Party line that it is mandatory to mistake for the Common Good. Liberality is destabilizing to established structures of power. And Dkos, as a power structure, is predictably Janus-faced: liberalizing toward others (crashing their gates) and internally controlling.
As the country as a whole justifies its two-faced nature by means of the threat of external enemies, so too do the dominant voices atDkos. Ok, so you don’t buy official 9/11 CT, fine. Just don’t talk about it here, because those discussions threaten the overall mission of Dkos, which is to win elections for Democrats. This line of reasoning reinforces the illusion that mistrust of the official 9/11 CT is a fringe position [UPDATE: a position, that is, fringe and hence merely divisive; rather than a popular position capable of serving as a rallying point]. As Mark Crispin Miller and others have noted, the same treatement has been given to the issue of election fraud [UPDATE: in other words, both are treated as distractions away from the business of the progressive movement, rather than the profoundly motivating issues that they actually are].
Yet, as with mistrust in the outcome of the last two Presidential elections, mistrust of the official 9/11 CT has grown to a majority position in spite of the stigmatization of such mistrust as a form of insanity.
On that note, I’m going to end this diary. Incomplete, and very far from perfect, but the best I can do at the moment.
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A more appeallingly written discussion of censorship on Dkos can be found here. Curmudgette writes:
Without carefully instituted policies in place to protect free speech and provide for the unfettered freedom to state minority viewpoints, human beings just run roughshod over each other.
To this I would add that what we have seen and are seeing at Dkos is not simply the stifling of minority viewpoints. Such a stifling, while not ideal, could still fit within the notion of a leaderless community establishing its own values – which we might consider, for example, along lines laid down by Mills in his essay “On Liberty”. On the issues of election fraud and 9/11 uCT, what we’ve seen at Dkos is transformation by suppression of the majority viewpoint. It is not, in other words, merely the suppression of a minority viewpoint, but the determined rendering of a majority viewpoint as the delusion of an abberant minority. By such efforts, the majority is effectively kept unconscious of itself. Mark Crispin Miller’s analysis of this as regards election fraud is the best writing I’ve seen on this subject by far.
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UPDATE: Thanks to everyone for reading, posting and recommending. I’d hesitated posting this diary for a while because I didn’t want to get involved in a flame war over Dkos. It’s very interesting to see the difference in tone between discussions at Dkos and discussions here.
As has been noted, the issue of censorship there has been well covered. Still, after reading Mark Crispin Miller’s excellent and inspiring open letter to Slate, I felt again that an additional point needed to be made, concerning the way in which majority opinion is stigmatized and made invisible. Kansas ably picks up on this theme in the comments below:
This describes the state of our whole country, with the Rovians as perpetrators. From vote fraud, to 9/11 to abortion, and on down the line, the Repubs, with media help, manage to keep. . . “the majority. . .unconscious of itself.” The Dems should be waking up that majority, but too many Dem leaders seem to be still asleep, themselves, or else they have their own vested interests in keeping the majority unconscious of itself and its own potential collective power.
I regard coming to understand this dynamic as an imperative. Thanks to you all for helping me out in this regard by focusing on the point, as kansas put it, “buried” in this diary.
