Hello, this is Eli Lake, and you're listening to The Reeducation.

Today's show is about disinformation, and our guest is Christine Rosen, a senior writer at Commentary Magazine.

Earlier in April, the Atlantic Magazine and the University of Chicago held a three-day conference on disinformation.

If you've read the elite media in the last six years, then you would know that disinformation is a serious problem these days.

The gatekeepers, the professional journalists, the academics, the government bureaucrats, are now widely disdained.

Millions of Americans no longer believe them.

So they turn to hucksters, conspiracy theorists, and even foreign propaganda to tell them what is true.

Our ability to self-govern is now in peril, the anti-disinformation industry tells us, because millions of

Americans can't even agree on reality.

How can you persuade someone who sincerely believes there is a pedophile cult that secretly runs the

government, or that the 2020 presidential election was stolen?

If only the plebes would listen to their betters, they might not be so

confused. Now that is a bit of a caricature. But to be fair, there's some truth to this broader

critique. The change is wrought to our society, not to mention our own minds by social media,

smartphones, and the internet are monumental.

Cranks have found large audiences.

Lies have been amplified.

Conspiracy theorists have built online communities that reinforce their elaborate unreality.

This development has had real-world consequences.

Long before the rise of Donald Trump and the COVID pandemic,

anti-vaxxers were able to organize online and create their own alternative narratives about life-saving vaccines.

A lunatic with a gun in 2016 stormed the Comet Pizzeria because he believed, based on what he read on social media,

...