chapter 5 Epistemological poisoning.docx

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Chapter 5: The Epistemological Poisoning of America

* Portions of this chapter contain personal narratives and anecdotes that clarify and support the contentions of this chapter. This first person testimonies are those of Dr. Ben Voth based on more than 20 years of being a professor in Texas, Kansas, and Ohio.

The moral malaise of 21st century America is paradoxical. On the one hand, American strength and prosperity reached a peak as the century began while on the other hand, public confidence in institutions was in precipitous decline. This unusual condition is the result of communication driven principles. The epistemological organs of the United States became corrupted and contributed to a public sense of decline. Epistemology is a complex word for how we know the truth. For society, we rely upon key organizations of trust to help us understand and apprehend the truth. Of course we are rarely certain of anything but we can improve our decision-making well above random chance if our deliberative institutions do their due diligence in seeking truth. This chapter analyzes the evidence for the corruption of those political organs: higher education, the journalistic press, the Church, Hollywood and the federal government. These five epistemological organs of the United States pump the facts and truth of our lives to compose a grand narrative about our expectations. The weakening of these organs is reducing our experience collectively to one more akin to a state of propaganda like that described by theorist Jacques Ellul.
Jacques Ellul explains the pervasive reality of propaganda in public life in his 1965 work, Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes: "The more stereotypes in a culture, the easier it is to form public opinion, and the more an individual participates in that culture, the more susceptible he becomes to the manipulation of these symbols." These communication processes are more enhanced by the intensity and pervasiveness of more advanced information technologies than those seen by Ellul. Propaganda is a concerted communication action involving multiple actors committed to instilling a unified vision and conviction within the public. We tend to intuitively connect these practices to the World War II era in relation to the malignant efforts of Adolph Hitler and even the relatively benign U.S. effort to rally support for the Allied war effort against Hitler. But propaganda is a communication constant of any organized society. The internet and related communication actions such as social media amplify a relationship between the public and epistemological actors allowing for an important cotemporary means of propaganda known as "nudging." Nudging is a process elaborated by academic expert Cass Sunstein. Sunstein sought to nuance the propaganda techniques commonly examined in 20th century communication theory and contextualize it to the intensely pervasive communication processes associated with the internet. Nudging allows current propagandists to utilize the instantaneous nature of emails, twitter, instagram, facebook, websites, and various internet-based software applications to create a virtual world that rivals reality. Google, which functions today as the essential epistemological source of the internet, has met more than 200 times with executives in the White House interested in nudging the global public toward their narrow ideological interests. The surveilling aspects of the internet allow propagandists to engage in activities such as micro-targeting, where individuals are targeted for their discrete dispositions and preferences. Consequent to these techniques, we experience a social reality dramatically more manipulated than, perhaps, any time in history. The public sense of this painful reality is, arguably, a driving factor in present public frustration directed at the public sphere in polling regarding institutions. Put simply, public trust of major cultural institutions is at an all time low.
The Past as our Prologue to Poisoning
All of this is rather neutral and irrelevant to our interest in public frustration observed in chapter one, if we cannot accurately discern what is being transmitted in this propaganda. American political identity is, arguably, a juxtaposition between individual human freedom and collective action. The original American experiment textually discovered in the Constitution suggests that individuals have rights and that they exist in a perilous relationship to the State. The combined specificity of individual rights apparent in portions of this document, such as the Bill of Rights, constitute strong political assertions and co-exist with rather specific limits set on the central Federal government. It is apparent from a variety of sources that the American political founding was highly suspicious of authoritarian control like that embodied in European monarchies. At almost the same political era of the American founding in the late 18th century, we find a rival political practice in the French Revolution. Occurring after the American Revolution, the French Revolution established by Jacobin advocates utilized an incredibly violent internal doctrine to establish a more centrally driven view of politics. A legal analyst explained the Jacobin tradition this way: "French Jacobinism is--perhaps--one of the most debated ideologies that emerged from the French Revolution. In plain terms, we can say it was one of the radical factions, the one whose major aim was to build a democratic republic and to end the privileges of the Ancien Régime." These events attracted one of America's more secular advocates, Thomas Paine. Paine was nearly killed by Jacobin revolutionaries when he went to assist that political movement because he was not radical enough for the French revolutionaries. The distinct natures of these political revolutions was apparent and textually evident in the famous works by French thinker Alexis de Tocqueville who in the mid to early 19th century observed the differences of these political projects in his extensive tome. To some extent the rivalry of the French emphasis on equality versus the American political emphasis on individuality, remains with us today in contemporary political debate.
The current wave of malaise—and there have been many in America's political past—is rooted in the 1960s when America began to reconsider the balance between equality and individuality. The American Civil Rights movement was both a catalyst and signifier of American politics for that era. For communication scholars, the "I Have a Dream" speech of 1963 by Martin Luther King, still stands as one of the most important rhetorical features of American public address. It is iconic and signifies the American approach to important global and domestic questions regarding racism, discrimination and equality. King's suggestion that ideally Americans would be judged by "the content of their character and not the color of their skin" remains a touchstone of the restorative view of an American dream as originally understood and now satisfactorily reformed in the events of 1963. The speech remains the most memorable and central feature of that era. There was, however, an extensive political struggle embarked upon in the 1960s, and the remnants of that debate remain with us in contemporary arguments over movements such as "Black Lives Matter."
The Good Disciple of Epistemology: the Great Debater, James Farmer Jr.
Immersed in the critical era of 1960s civil rights activism was a unique and compelling advocate—"the Great Debater" James Farmer Jr. Farmer was one of the big six civil rights leaders who stood alongside Martin Luther King and Whitney Young toward the accomplishment of important civil rights successes such as the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Though Farmer and Malcolm X, were friends and debating opponents, Farmer's "community of the beloved" stood in sharp contrast and opposition to the dis-integrationist advocacy of Malcolm X and other more militant black activists who viewed the American political premises as a farce. Malcolm X in fact referred to the 1963 March on Washington as the "Farce on Washington." The views of Malcolm X and other similarly minded militants was that judgment based on character rather than skin color was unworkable and destructive.
Farmer's activism on the question of racism predated the work of Martin Luther King considerably. James Farmer Jr. founded the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in 1941. Farmer learned during his Christian seminary training in Washington DC about Hindu non-violent methodologies for political confronting injustice. In 1942, Farmer enacted the first civil rights sit-in in Chicago's Jack Spratt restaurant. The effort was tenaciously patient, and he made the greater effort to preemptively contact the police in order to explain what was going to happen. The police did not arrest anyone at the sit-in when the owner called for them. Following the sit-in, the owner peacefully relented to the integration advocated by Farmer. Farmer led the Freedom Bus rides activism of 1961 that produced major national media coverage when one of the buses was firebombed at Aniston, Alabama and riders like John Lewis were pulled off and beaten by segregationist. Farmer was arguably the heir-apparent to the civil rights legacy when King was assassinated in 1968. Farmer's bipartisan habits of supporting Republicans and Democrats in the cause toward American integration seemed ideal. However, Farmer reported that he was ultimately unable to bridge the divide between white liberals and domestic "jacobins." Jacobins sought to wrestle CORE and larger Civil Rights movement away from non-violent principles and toward more militant actions. The collapse of constructive racial dialogue in the 1970s is presage to our present impasse on this question. While Farmer refused to specify the names of the militants that were pressing the Civil Rights movement away from its non-violent CORE convictions, it is apparent that more confrontational political approaches pushed him out of the public spotlight. Farmer objected to the interjection of Vietnam as a political issue within the civil rights movement and was critical of collaboration with known advocates of communism. These objections factored into his political demise.
Farmer's lost status as a civil rights leader is a marker for our present political trajectory that increasingly relies upon the cynically grounded principles of rhetorical action and intimidation offered by the Jacobins of the 18th century, and in a more polished and contemporary form of explanation provided by Saul Alinsky. Alinsky's political persuasion model relied upon ridicule and harsh communication tactics used to compel institutions toward compromise of principles. Alinsky is an important intellectual model for current Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton who met Alinksy and wrote her own academic papers based on his biography and advocacy.
By the late 1960s and early 1970s, a Jacobin movement for replacing individual liberty with a conviction about equality was in nascent stages of powerful American political activism. These Jacobin forces came to shape our present practices of propaganda and form a basis for overthrowing American traditions of individual liberty in favor of collective power held in central governing authorities. Essential in this political practice was a well worn pattern of organizing individuals into groups identified as disenfranchised and arguing that their collective experience was unequal and therefore merited a requisite increase in federal power in order to provide remedy to this unequal experience. This rhetorical practice is well described by Thomas Sowell. Sowell suggests that there are a group of political partisans in the United States who discursively seek to represent groups in victim categories known as "mascots" in order to galvanize their own political partisans as being the most suitable representatives of these marginalized groups. The consequence of this repetitive process of creating mascots of human groups used to maximize greater central governing authority diminishes the daily capacity and practice of individual liberty. The recent political firestorm surrounding individuals like Kentucky legal clerk Kim Davis and the larger set of state actions known as Religious Freedom Restoration Acts (RFRA) clarify how the collective identity of sexual politics trumps individual free exercise of religion spelled out in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. Those juxtapositions of group rights against individual rights creates a larger social cascade against individual liberty and drives the United States toward the Jacobin ambitions of those seeking greater central governing authority in the name of "equality." Gun rights, property rights, speech rights and an array of conventionally American civil rights are now problematized as Jacobin partisans point to inequality as a basis for revoking in gradual but steady political acts the practical capacity of individual liberty. The rhetorical concept of "equality" is invoked to destroy the American dream. It is here that the paradoxical rise of American outrage provides the backlash to this Jacobin push. Anyone—even someone ostensibly in one of these political mascot groups—has the potential to witness the demise of their individual liberty. The peculiar case of Bruce Jenner is indicative. Though recently "anointed" by our interpretive elite as a case study in this political process, Jenner identifies as a conservative Republican opposed to gay marriage and an array of government intrusions against individuals. Journalists like Diane Sawyer can hardly contain their televised amusement at the obvious political circus created by this cynical spiral of politics. This is the cynical Jacobin Alinsky methodology for turning the American dream inside out. It has for several decades increased its intensity and is amplified by theorists such as Cass Sunstein. The original political vision of limited government toward the ends of increasing individual liberty, both inside and outside the United States, is jeopardized by this successful propaganda process. This process is inflaming American individuals toward record levels of distrust toward the institutions, charged with telling us the truth about the world we live in today. It is useful and important to turn our attention toward those epistemological organs to understand how the American dream is being undone and locating a basis for how it will ultimately be restored. Let's examine the epistemological organs of the American civic body one by one.
Higher Education
Copied from German counterparts, American higher education has become an epistemological organ of paramount importance. Millions of American young people are conditioned to believe that their adult fates rest largely upon the choice and enactment of college and university life. This social convergence of this conviction has created a powerful national industry wherein students now accumulate more than one trillion dollars in debt in order to complete roughly four years of instruction to earn a degree used as a marker for employment qualification. The demand for college instruction is economically clear because college and tuition costs have increased at rates well above the inflation rates and colleges and universities clamor to provide more attractive conditions for spending those consumer dollars. Universities are powerful mini-cities that exert cultural influence well beyond their occupied space.
As the training pre-requisite of America's employable classes, Jacobin radicals recognized the importance of seizing higher education for their own ideological ends. In the 1960s, the campuses of America became quasi-war zones centered on the very moral essence of American war making as understood in the then contemporary example of the Vietnam war. Student sit-ins operationalizing the grand designs of Jacobins, like Saul Alinsky, shut down college campuses and forced a visceral epistemological judgment on the question of American war-making. What was won in the war against "war" was an emerging epistemological insight against the allegedly basic instinct of American higher education: that America was and remains exceptional. America is a nation of exceptional moral character and ethical good. The tearing down of the American institution of the United States military was an important first step in building a new domestic Jacobin order wherein students would be inculcated into a premise that the only thing exceptional about America, was her guilt.
The alleged deliberate killing of innocent civilians in Vietnam was and remains an intellectual interpretive Rubicon that, once crossed, has not been returned from. When America goes to war, she goes "to kill innocent people" and not to pursue justice, or fairness, or freedom. This absurd moral premise is now the prima-facie interpretive consideration of all subsequent military actions undertaken by the United States—whether in Panama, Grenada, Iraq, Libya, or Afghanistan. The question of whether this is another "Vietnam" is a now archetypal thought launched and continually indoctrinated in higher education.
While anti-American hegemons around the world have prospered directly from these anti-patriotic hymns led by intellectual choir leaders such as Noam Chomsky and Ward Churchill, the collective circumstances of how those individuals, in the clutches of authoritarianism globally, have been harmed, is drowned out. Without academic tenure and arrays of student radicals willing to antagonize any semblance of respect for the United States military these Jacobins would likely have failed to overthrow a basic public consensus for patriotic support of the military in wartime. Those unique epistemological features of universities made them ideal launching points for ideological propaganda that remains with us to this day. Many campuses continue to maintain discriminatory practices against military recruiting on college campuses as ongoing homage to this anti-war principle.
As a director of debate I witness the frontlines of this propaganda war on an almost monthly basis. I have worked across the United States at different campuses hosting public debates on current controversies. At the height of the second war in Iraq in 2005, I hosted a debate on the campus of Miami University in Ohio. The topic was, of course, the justness of the Iraq war. I was moderating. I observed many vehement anti-war activists denouncing the war precisely in the terms noted above. At one point, an activist turned toward ROTC members seated in the audience in uniform, and said, "These are murderers on scholarship! We should not have such activity being conducted in our names!" Many in the audience gasped at this declaration but there were many who shared the viewpoint and nodded along. Calmly, a young female lieutenant stood and responded: "We are bound by our military code to refrain from telling you what you should think about this war. What I can tell you, however, is that whatever you decide in the political processes of this nation, we will carry out—to the risk of our very lives. It is our greatest purpose to defend your liberty in making these deliberations tonight."
The painful paradox of the two comments was exactly what Alinsky always wanted—to force virtuous institutions like the American military, to be broken by their own adherence to moral fidelity. Make them adhere impossibly to their own rules—Alinksy suggests. No organization can meet its own demands. The radical Jacobin methodology involves highlighting hypocrisy without sustaining an alternative or system that would be vulnerable to the same critique offered by these radicals. This type of radicalism is at the heart of Jacobin operations to turn the American dream inside out.
In January of 2005, I had another indicative campus experience. The university invited notorious Jacobin intellectual professor Ward Churchill to campus to give a guest lecture. He spoke for over an hour and ended with a typically passionate invective for students to rise up and challenge all known authority including the police and certainly the absurd and 'discriminatory war on terror.' The floor was opened to questions and I was prepared to ask professor Churchill about his September 12, 2001 essay "Some People Push Back." To that point in time, almost no one had publicly challenged, in an academic setting, Churchill's absurd contention that the nearly 3,000 victims at the World Trade Center got the violent killings they deserved on September 11, 2001. According to Churchill, these innocent victims were "little Eichmans"—or more precisely—high ranking Nazi officers who deserved to die. I asked if he still believed those written words, four years later, and he told me he did. I tried to object and raise more questions about this allegation but an associate dean took the microphone away from me and told me my questions were not appropriate. With the microphone taken away from me, Churchill proceeded to lecture me on how I 'did not know who Adolf Eichman was' and that Eichman was a passive participant in the Holocaust and was properly viewed as a "technocrat." Similarly, Churchill still believes that all Americans participating in capitalism today are part of a systemic genocidal machine that kills thousands of people everyday around the world. As common participants, all Americans deserve the same outcome as Adolf Eichman, who was hanged many years later for his role in actively directing and implementing the Holocaust.
This event is neither isolated nor idiosyncratic. In the fall of 2015, at the season opening debate tournament, America's top college students gathered in Kansas City to debate whether the United States should reduce its military presence around the world—a resolution in perfect keeping with emerging themes of the academy as they relate to the U.S. military. One of the nation's leading programs from the University of Oklahoma argued in its first affirmative speech in the varsity division of the tournament, that Ward Churchill is right—Americans are ranking Nazi lieutenants—and the proper atonement for our exceptionalist sins is the removal of the imperial American military from global venues. One of my novice debate teams lost to a similar argument by Oklahoma that "America should forget about the events of 911" because it underlies the unjust actions of the war on terror. The identification of Americans as essential evil, metaphorically recognized as a ranking Nazi officer who was so militantly committed to the Holocaust that he disobeyed orders to stop the killing—is a shocking betrayal of any notion of "higher" in education. It is a deliberate act of debasing the student so as to create a propaganda relationship between the cleansing authorial advocate and the subjugated guilty American student.
These examples are only signs of a much broader agenda to compel the undergraduate population predominantly composed of young 18-22 year-olds, to agree and support political frameworks rooted in identity politics. The Western traditions of individual liberty are mocked and critiqued as mere masks for imperial, colonialist, hegemons who seek to kill the weak and dominate the Earth in dangerous unjust manners. Every college student is called to a common Jacobin cause of overthrowing this capitalist nightmare known as America, and saving billions of innocent global citizens from the nightmare and ethical harm knows as globalization.
This absurd moral charge woven into ever growing aspects of multicultural education on college campuses is contrasted to the hidden reality of how more people are being lifted out of poverty globally at a greater rate than at anytime in human history. In 2015, I was hosting the Rwandan national debate team in a debate on the same US military presence question, and we localized the topic to the greater Horn of Africa. The Rwandan team won convincingly, arguing the well-worn creed that America is imperialistic and will only make things worse by trying to oppose terrorism. Our college students voted by 27-12 against our SMU team defending US efforts to prevent terrorist groups like Al-Shabab from continuing their mass killings at shopping malls in Kenya and throughout the Horn of Africa. The result was somewhat predictable and was similar to a debate we had one year prior regarding potential US leadership to stop genocide. The next day I was in my debate office asking the Rwandans about current conditions in their country. I asked, "What do you think the average life expectancy of Rwandans is today?" They answered sorrowfully that it was quite low and probably in the high 40s. We googled the fact, and a chart appeared on my computer for the past 30 years of life expectancy for Rwandans compared to Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The current life expectancy of Rwandans is more than 60 years. The Rwandans were surprised it was so high. I pointed out to them that not only was it high, that it had increased dramatically since the genocide in the mid 1990s—when life expectancy dropped into the 20s—but it exceeded nearby Burundi and even Uganda. Rwanda is, in fact, a continental leader in terms of medical and economic progress for its citizens. Rwanda—like many painful places on the earth has made extraordinary progress in the American-led world of recent decades. Africa and Asia have experienced the most dramatic drops in poverty and rebounds in public health. But those facts are not explained on college campuses and they are definitely not extolled. Free markets, democracy, and concerted military responses have made the world safer and more humane than ever. The deliberate propaganda promoted on college campuses is more than unfortunate. It deliberately clouds the path to justice and human well-being. Moreover, the most elaborated political project for rejecting capitalism—communism—killed more than 100 million people in the 20th century by the most conservative estimates. Students grapple with whether to adopt a socialist candidate for the American presidency because they are so overwrought with guilt about the inequality of American capitalism. This is the nature of insidious propaganda as described by theorists such as Jacques Ellul. It is closing the American mind on college campuses as we speak and this process renders a cynical youth that cannot imagine solutions to the remaining problems of the day.
The Church
The Church is composed of the transcendent moral leadership of the nation and typically extolls the supernatural care of God in the affairs of all human beings. As with the civil rights movement, the notion of a "prophetic voice" is commonly promoted in Judeo-Christian traditions common to American political development. America's notion of a civil religion was well regarded and elaborated by Robert Bellah. Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders spoke in this archetypal form. The communication field elaborates specific genres such as the "Jeremiad" to clarify for students and the public how the church takes a role in shaping both public opinion and public policy.
An incident involving this genre is illustrative of how this common American civil function has been silenced and ended. I was attending an academic conference in the 1990s. One of our top national scholars in public address was analyzing the research question of why Martin Luther King so regularly utilized the religious form of the Jeremiad. After 15 minutes of oral presentation, the scholar could only guess that King was emulating the Jacobin radicals of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), but he hoped the audience could give him some help. I actually thought he was being ironic and humorous, but I had never seen a scholar deliberately hide such an obvious answer to a not too difficult research question. By the end of the panel discussion, someone on the back row raised their hand, "Do you think the fact that King was a Baptist minister might have influenced his choice of a religious form?" The scholar was incredulous, "Really? I will have to look into that." I was staggered to realize that it was possible to know of Martin Luther King without knowing he was a Baptist minister—let alone as a premiere academic on American public address.
The scholar's problem was symptomatic of a broader problem affecting our study of the church as a political advocate. We have simply thoroughly secularized our understanding of American history. While obtaining my doctorate in Communication Study at the University of Kansas during the 1990s, my lead instructor Dr. Robert Rowland dropped the rhetorical strategy of Biblical allusions from student learning requirements for the undergraduate public rhetoric course. It was not because our artifacts lacked Biblical allusions. By the mid-1990s, students were largely unaware and unable to detect this rhetoric.
In this case, academia and higher education are reacting to a larger ideological force that is destroying the church's epistemic capacity. The simple ideological doctrine is a separation of church and state. Derived from Thomas Jefferson's famous metaphor offered in 1802 when reassuring Danbury Baptists that their religious activities would be safe in the new American republic. This metaphor was re-organized by justice Hugo Black on the Supreme Court to turn our individual civil rights with regard to religion inside out. In essence, we have come to believe that having religious liberty depends upon having none. Religious liberty in this distorted view, suggests that public religious utterances that affect political life violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. This is, of course, the exact opposite of what the First Amendment plainly states: The Congress shall make no respecting an establishment of religion or abridging the free exercise thereof. . ." The Supreme Court used the metaphor for the first time in 1878 when it defended the institution of marriage as being between one man and one woman when Mormons sought to change that definition in the Utah territory. The metaphor did not come up again until 1947, in the Everson case. Former KKK member Hugo Black explained in the majority opinion that while school busing for Catholic educational purposes was legally allowed by the Supreme Court, the First Amendment did in fact "build a high and impregnable wall between the church and the state." Black's judicial opinion contained all manner of dramatic invective against the dangers of religious political rhetoric and traced the American identity to the rejection of religious persecutions conducted in Europe prior to the founding of the colonies. The new notion seemed innocent enough at the time—especially since it left intact an arguable breach of that wall by allowing transportation for Catholic education from public schools. The separation ideology began to subtly shape American notions of religious liberty more toward the French Jacobin traditions of keeping religions out of the public and civil sphere of governance.
By 1962, Hugo Black and a majority of the Court were confident in shocking the American public with the Engel v. Vitale decision that banned schools from leading prayers and Bible reading for public school students. For cultural conservatives like David Barton, the year and the decision stands as a stark marker for religion's departure from the American public sphere. Decisions like this in the 1960s continued the secular fear-mongering toward religion until Black's departure from the Court in 1971. By that time, roughly 25 years of promoting the separation doctrine on the Court had distilled to our epistemological leaders a passionate conviction that America is founded upon a principle of "separation of church and state." The phrase is still thrown out regularly by journalists, academics, politicians and other opinion leaders as a moral measure of proper convictions surrounding the Church's role in politics—which is silence. It is difficult to find any era of American history reflecting such a presently accepted truism. Tocqueville made this dramatic observation about America in 1835: "Americans combine the notions of Christianity and liberty so intimately that it is impossible to compel them to think of one without the other." William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech in the late 19th century explicitly relied upon American Christian notions of crucifixion to understand why the gold standard should be rejected as a political argument. Martin Luther King preached explicitly against segregation from Christian church pulpits and "Letter from Birmingham Jail" is nearly incoherent as an argument without a close textual knowledge of the New Testament—though you might never know that from the Atlantic's recently 50th anniversary publication of a redacted version. The ideology of separation of church and state requires an acceptance that the First Amendment religion clauses are a self-contradictory truth: we can only have religious liberty in America if we have none. Such contradictions are consistent with Jacobin strategies of textual deconstruction.
The contemporary church has largely forfeited its political prophetic voice in fear that it will lose its tax-exempt status by way of the Internal Revenue Service. Americans United for Separation of Church and State and other related advocacy groups work diligently to impose this political censorship upon churches. This Jacobin advocacy has worked effectively to marginalize the epistemological function of the church in the American civic body.
By the 1980s, conservative justices like Antonin Scalia were complaining that the wall was not a wall, but a bulldozer, driving religion out of American public life. We might more correctly surmise in the 21st century that the wall separating church and state is, in fact, a filter. This rhetorical filter encourages religious combinations that favor the politics of the Jacobins seeking to rationalize state power against the individual.
Take, for example, the latest installment in cultural revolution: gay marriage. Marriage is arguably a religious establishment. Can the federal government change the definition of marriage to suit its own political taste? In 1878, the Court said that was impossible—as much as the Mormons in Utah wanted it. But in the summer of 2015, that breach of the wall separating church and state was able to easily accommodate a dramatic revision to a religious belief largely unchanged for millennia. Here we see the depth of Jacobin political cynicism. The wall is for keeping out rival political arguments favoring the individual. It is a preservation of state power—not a prevention against its accretion. Notice that local state clerks who issued marriage licenses in defiance of state and federal laws naming marriage as between a man and a woman, were not publicly castigated for 'failing to do their jobs.' Today we see radicalized acrimony against Kim Davis refusing to issue gay marriage licenses after the Supreme Court revised the definition of marriage. It is an ideological calculation of power—not principle. The Pope is applauded whenever he agrees with Jacobin revisions of the religious order regarding capitalism and sexuality, but booed and shunned when he attempts to reify or preserve religious orders against these Jacobin principles.
The political neutering of the Church as an epistemological organ began in earnest in the 1960s as atheists and other church opposed groups organized to use the First Amendment Establishment Clause as a political weapon against the free exercise of religion. There is little effective litigation on behalf of the free exercise of religion. Increasingly, litigants seek to defend their religious speech under the broader free speech premises that have not been attacked as effectively by Jacobin activists. Under such conditions, the cleansing epistemological organ of the church is not free to work effectively in our nation.
Journalism and free press
Nestled alongside our first amendment free exercise of religion and free speech is a guarantee of a free press. American visionaries believed that a free press could help detect corruption in government and lessen the risks of each undue expansion and concurrent abuse in power. This epistemological organ has also been failing us, and again public measures regarding trust in this institution of American life are at record lows. The public believes that the media is profoundly biased, and they believe journalists dramatically distort the information they receive. Those trends have accelerated to unprecedented levels of public anger. The problem of media bias is well documented and detailed in the excellent work by Jim Kuyper detailing a similar systemic corruption of the journalistic process that is supposed to interrogate the powerful in order to prevent abuses of the weak and vulnerable. Kuyper traces a similar trend rooted in the 1960s where journalistic assessment of the Vietnam war embodied in the CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite took an ideological turn. Cronkite's misrepresentations of American military success in Vietnam were decisive in rallying anti-war activist toward further engagement in the cause. These interpretations were vital to the Jacobin insurgencies against the Democrat party convention in 1968 Chicago.
These trends amplified by journalism schools on college campuses have accentuated the ideological delivery of news in the 21st century. Party affiliation of journalists remains decisively one-sided—favoring the democrats by more than 3 to1 in almost all newsrooms. A mutual fantasy between the political party of favor (Democrats) and journalists is that this political collaboration is morally justified as part of a broader agenda of protecting the weak from the ravages of inequality. The Jacobin elements seeking to displace individual liberty in favor of state managed equality convinced journalists to approach their craft with a clearer unrepentant ideology that interrogates one party defending established interests and the opposing party as being an inherent insurgency against the established interests. The public is overwhelmingly convinced that this bias is real and destructive to their trust of the original social contract in the First Amendment.
Another campus anecdote is illustrative. In 2004, a wonderful journalism colleague on my campus at Miami asked if I would come to her journalism and election 2004 class. She was concerned about her own biases for the democrats and wanted me to provide a balanced hearing of republican arguments. She also asked if I would read the 24 student essays they were required to write individually as election editorials. I did so and attended the class. I began with this explanation: "I want to begin by letting you know I read all 24 of your essays and enjoyed them immensely. They were well argued and evidenced for the sides that you took. I wonder if you are aware of this interesting trend for this class? 23 of you wrote editorials agreeing with or endorsing John Kerry for president and one of you wrote an editorial favoring Ralph Nader. Not one of your wrote an editorial in favor of the incumbent Republican candidate, President Bush." The students looked around in disbelief. It was clear from their reaction that they supposed that 'someone' in the class was writing in support of the incumbent President Bush—but no one was. I explained that the situation while initially surprising is actually endemic to journalism as a practice in 2004. I suggested that despite good intentions, it was unlikely that they had much of any understanding for what Republicans were saying and arguing given the obvious consensus that existed within their own training. What my colleague at Miami did was a noble and appropriate educational gesture. It nonetheless highlights an ongoing problem in journalistic programs that train students to be suspicious of Republicans and cooperative with Democrats. In working with college students—many of them journalists—they literally beg me for explanations of what and why Republicans are saying what they are saying. This does not begin to traverse the political divide that now exists between conservatives and Republicans. That creates an even more severe dissonance problem.
Another anecdote is also indicative of how far off from a free press we have gone. In 1996, Republicans had a number of candidates seeking the nomination to run against incumbent president Bill Clinton. Among them was a surprising upstart by the name of Alan Keyes. Keyes is an African American and in 1996 his oratorical skills were greatly admired and he finished strongly in the Iowa and New Hampshire Presidential Republican caucuses. That set up a televised candidate debate in 1996 at an Atlanta TV station. Keyes was invited to attend by the Atlanta Press Club. About a week before the event, the station had second thoughts about hosting Keyes, but Keyes remain adamant that he had an invitation and other candidates said the original plan should be honored. That set the stage for a rather incredible incident. On the night of the debate, Keyes arrived along with dozens of supporters for the televised debate. As Keyes approached the venue, the station called Atlanta police to the site. In front of television news crews recording the event, Alan Keyes was handcuffed and pushed into the backseat of a police car. He was driven to the edge of Atlanta and released on the top of a parking garage while the television debate went on without him. At no time was Alan Keyes charged with a crime. He was simply handcuffed by officers and forcibly removed from the property of the station and driven away. It sounds like something from a distant authoritarian government. The next day, the democratic major of Atlanta, Bill Campbell, apologized for Keyes mistreatment, saying 'this is not usually how we treat our guests in the city.' That was the end of the conflict. No lawsuits were filed. No other apologies were made. One of the nation's first serious African-American presidential candidates was handcuffed in Atlanta and forcibly removed from a televised public debate. Imagine for a moment if in 2008, Presidential candidate Barack Obama had shown up for a democratic primary debate and instead of entering the studio, was met by police officers, forcibly detained, and driven off-site until the debate was over. America's epistemological communities would have rallied Jacobin forces to powerful results-- immediately. Epistemological voices would have thundered against the outrageous racial slur inherent in such actions. It is impossible to reconcile the events that happened to Keyes-- and still viewable today on youtube-- without understanding that the journalistic community believes that the concept of racism is an ideograph. Michael Calvin McGee pioneered this important rhetorical notion suggesting that certain terms exert powerful political influence in society despite their compartmentalized wording and symbolism. Alan Keyes could not be a victim of racism because racism is an ideograph that serves only Jacobin ideological interests. It demonstrates rather forcefully that journalism exists as service for these ideological interests and not for the political interests of individual liberty as embodied in Alan Keyes' free political speech rights and political arguments.
Journalism today continues to serve limited political interests. Fox news is derided as "partisan" by our elite while almost all other news outlets are relatively unchallenged as non-partisan. Coverage of political arguments associated with individual human liberty face severe challenge in the journalistic community as those individual rights are juxtaposed strategically in narratives of group rights versus individual rights. This is indicative of how another epistemological organ is failing the civic body of America.
Hollywood
Communication scholar Walter Fisher demonstrated with great effectiveness that human beings are valuably understood as storytellers. We are in his words "homo-narrans." Because stories are so important in how we organize and make sense of the world, the role of Hollywood is important to the process of understanding the truth. Hollywood and its related visual entertainment mediums play an important epistemological role in making sense of who we are as Americans. The American entertainment industry is globally important and sells billions of dollars in products by way of movies and other programming.
As with journalism, Americans do not perceive that Hollywood provides them with an unfiltered or undistorted view of reality. The essence of this dialectic between an epistemological community like Hollywood and the American public is the work of film critic Michael Medved. Medved's original work criticizing Hollywood's outrageous cultural choices designed to thwart American conventions propelled Michael Medved into the major role of political radio commentator alongside individuals like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. His radio show is listened to by millions of viewers.
His essential commentary and argument is that despite clear economic incentives to produce programming that resonates with American values of patriotism and virtue, Hollywood continues to make films with horrific cynical premises designed to degrade American self-perceptions and indulge in value relativism over idealism. Medved's argument remains demonstrably true as box office earnings continue to reflect the irrational choices of the producers as compared to public choices of what media they like.
In television, we can observe the same phenomena. Television shows that affirm traditional narrative interpretations of the Bible find record audiences while movies that obliterate traditional biblical stories like Noah and the flood are financial busts. Ronald Reagan arguably began his political trajectory as a backlash to the influence of communism within the movie industry. His frustration reached such a crescendo that he rejected being a Democrat and became the presently iconic historically conservative American president. The role of Ronald Reagan emerging from Hollywood's distortive grip is an important indicator of what Hollywood and television can do to influence the public toward epistemological outcomes.
The Federal Government
The federal government is the world's largest corporation. It is of course the essence of central government in the United States and is principally contained in the nation's capital of Washington DC. It is both symbolically and literally the actual origin of potential threats imagined in the Constitution—that the government might become so large that it became a threat to an American dream of "government of the people, by the people and for the people." The federal government serves vital and inherently necessary epistemic functions. Among the most important of these functions, is assessing and responding to external threats, like war. To inquire about the federal government's epistemic function is not to say it should have no function or to encourage such inherently limited functions as to unleash anarchy or radical insecurity in our society. Nonetheless, it is important to understand the current scope and function of the federal government—especially in its function as an epistemic agent.
As the world' largest financial entity, the federal government takes in three trillion dollars a year or more in annual budget income. As a matter of perspective, it is thought that in the near future Apple might possibly approach someday soon the status as the first trillion dollar valued company. Annual collections of the federal government are three times the size of the world's largest private company. This size is important to acknowledge when one of the most clever and pervasive slogans of our contemporary Jacobin movement is the idea of going after "big" companies. Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Banks and Big Agriculture are some of the many "big" corporations that need to be taken down by government regulation, limitations and taxation. The government needs to get bigger so these unsavory big companies can be liquidated toward the ideal political goal of equality. The public seems understandably interested in going after big government but our epistemological organs show little interest in organizing and supporting such rhetoric.
The three trillion dollar annual budgets are impressive enough to suggest that the federal government can exert massive propaganda power. This must be coupled with the perhaps more awe-inspiring reality that while the federal government collects three trillion dollars a year from Americans, it spends four trillion dollars every year! This corporation is able to spend almost one trillion dollars more every year than it takes in. This means that each year the federal government goes over budget the equivalent of an entire Apple company cash value. It is difficult to fathom how any other business, individual or entity in the world could be allowed to do such a thing. Going over budget in such a spectacular way is part of the epistemological power that is the federal government.
How does this happen? It is actually quite interesting and ironically signifies the power and magic of America. Our government sells treasury bonds on an open international market for which it promises to pay back creditors a rather small interest rate. The fact that the United States is able to do this without raising interest rates to attract investment is a testament to the symbolic power of the United States as an iconic form.
Conspiracy theorists of all stripes like to speculate about what would happen if these treasury notes were "dumped." The idea was quite popular in the 1980s when Japan was considered an insurgent economic rival to the US and was buying a lot of treasury notes. But the idea of dumping treasury notes is rather silly. They must be sold to have a financial return. Burning the notes would do nothing but free the US government from a financial burden and no nation holding such notes has shown any great power to dictate US policy. Quite the contrary, global nations need the US economy to succeed so that they can see a return on billions of dollars in purchased treasury notes.
The mystery of these financial arrangements leads to endless cynical conspiracies among partisans in America. Those vagaries are compounded by the powers of the federal reserve to print money and engage the economy in explicitly mysterious manners. Most importantly, after the great recession of 2009, the federal reserve made a habit of printing money in the form of billions of dollars of monthly stock purchases on Wall Street. Which companies had their stocks purchased? We may never know. That certainly helped those companies and those stockholders. It arguably hindered and perhaps harmed Americans who did not hold stocks directly while the stock market predictably rose with this operational "twist" of the federal reserve.
These unanswerable powers of the United States federal government only add to the mysterious epistemological power of the most expensive entity in human history. It in large measure explains why the surrounding suburbs of DC were exempt from the housing collapse and ensuing economic crisis that shook America in 2009. Housing prices and salaries continued to rise in DC while unemployment, housing prices, and salaries stalled or fell in other parts of the nation. Salaries for Federal employees are 78% higher than their private sector counterparts and their jobs are inherently more secure. This dramatic wage inflation contributes to the supposed concern jacobins have toward wage inequality in the United States. But that argument is used to further the growth of Federal government workforces both in size and compensation. The elections of 2010 and 2014 spelled out an electorate outraged at Washington and the "beltway insiders."
The federal government has vast epistemic powers that cannot be fully elaborated here but can be roughly outlined by highlighting the mere economic vastness of the systems. Thousands of pages of regulations added weekly to the federal register suggest an exponential growth in the terminology of illegality for which no citizen can reasonably account. The small percentage of the tax code regulations are now fully indiscernible to almost everyone and yet remain potent as a basis for challenging human behavior in the United States.
For the original revolution on behalf of individual human freedom, the current vastness of the United States federal government poses existential problems. Could a government of such size ever not intrude on the bill of rights? Can the simple federal provision of security be met without something as vast as NSA, TSA, the IRS and Homeland security? These are not easy questions for any serious partisan to answer. They nonetheless remain key signifiers that the federal government is an epistemological organ that is distorting our understanding of contemporary truth.
Summary
The violation of the social contract relies upon systemic propaganda. There are several apparent contributors to the present poisoning of the America mind:
A temporal departure from the American Revolution is leading us all toward a philosophical orientation more comparable to the French Revolution.
An ideal epistemological model for recovery is recent civil rights activist and great debater: James Farmer Jr.
Higher education is committed to partisan distortion of its original epistemological function.
The Church has fallen silent from its traditional prophetic role that can correct this epistemological crisis.
Journalists are declining into a praetorian guard that protects one political party while engaging its civil ethic against the other.
Hollywood extols anti-ethical and anti-American notions as it pursues the spiral of cynicism down the moral drain.
The Federal government is the world's largest corporation and defends its own expansion at the expense of its debt laden citizens.
The five epistemological organs must be restored to their proper civic function in order for the American civil body to recover in the 21st century.
Conclusion
This chapter analyzed the evidence for the corruption of our American political organs: higher education, the journalistic press corps, the church, Hollywood, and the federal government. These five epistemological organs of the United States pump the facts and truth of our lives to compose a grand narrative about our expectations. It is apparent that these failures of the organs in our American civic body corrupt our understanding and create the conditions of propaganda described by theorists like Jacques Ellul. Incredibly, despite these dire circumstances that contribute to a measurable and salient sense of public outrage, it is entirely possible to overcome and defeat these forces. It is possible to recover the idealistic components of an American dream. We know this primarily because, empirically, the nation has endured far worse epistemological poisonings than the one presently observed. It is nonetheless serious and will require careful attention and study offered in the following chapters of this book.

Endnotes
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Chapter 5: The Epistemological Poisoning of America- Voth