My impression has long been that the White House during Democratic administrations, bureaucrats, NGOs, academics, and the media routinely conspire together to promote The Latest Thing.
For example, why did well-known journalists think Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s absurd 2014 Rolling Stone fantasy about a fraternity initiation ritual gang rape on broken glass was great journalism? Because the prestige press had been promoting the frat boys are rapists party line since a 2013 Obama Administration “Dear Colleague” letter to allied college administrators.
Or why did transmania come out of the blue in 2015? Well, it didn’t. A lot of groundwork had been laid in previous years to get it ready.
Conspiring with your friends is how you get things done in this world.
But nobody thinks of these as conspiracy theories.
Occasionally, though, The Establishment screws up and gets the pieces in the wrong order, so the conspiracy is more evident. We can see this with the Gas Stove Fiasco of 2023.
Banning gas stoves has been on the agenda for a while, in part for Climate Change reasons. Los Angeles announced a ban on new gas stoves in 2023 a few months ago.
Then, a few weeks ago, some scientific journal published a study claiming that gas stoves were dangerous to children. But what with the Christmas holidays, the media forgot to promote it. So when a Biden official said the possibility of banning gas ranges nationally was on the table, everybody went “Huh?”
If the media had run a month of scare stories about gas stoves, this would have seemed natural, but instead it came out of the blue.
So conservative journalists pounced.
So the mainstream media immediately ran articles about how nobody wants to ban gas stoves, it’s just wingnut Culture War craziness.
But then the same outlets started to kick in on how gas stoves were dangerous and maybe should be banned.
Back in Obama’s second term, this operation would have been executed more competently, but Things Fall Apart.
