People are gullible. If you have worked in journalism at any level, you know that. I remember back in my radio days getting a flurry of phone calls one evening. A man had been found in the high desert south of town. He had been staked down naked at a crossroads and murdered. What’s more, his body was covered in occult markings. The rumor began to circulate that a satanic cult was sacrificing its victims in the wilderness under the cover of night. It was pretty juicy stuff, and it started just hours after an incident had been reported. And because it was so salacious and dramatic, I calmly put in a call to a detective I knew.
As it turned out, some poor guy who was working in the area had an accident and injured himself. He was fine. But by the time it got to me, the demon-worshippers were skulking in the dark corners of the town. And since it turned out to be nothing more than an ambulance call, I didn’t even write it up. But I did get a laugh out of it, especially from the people who wanted me to cover it. The truth is rarely as interesting as the rumor. And it’s always less fun.
Rumors and conspiracy theories can be entertaining and can even be dangerous. Which apparently is why the State Department has released a new game called Cat Park. The details and storyline of the game are rather long and complicated, and if you wish, you can read a synopsis in the stories from Just the News or the Post Millennial. The quick version is this: a player learns how fake news is created and disseminated in a storyline about a city trying to build a cat park. The player is taught about how people use social media to talk about the city abandoning important projects for an “elitist” cat park, and how to wake up the “sheep.”
As it turns out, the entire movement is actually the effort of a mysterious billionaire, seeking to profit from it. The game even includes an angry “working class” hotdog vendor. Does anything sound familiar about that? Ostensibly, the idea is to teach people how disinformation is created and spread and how to spot it.
Just the News reviewed a memo from Secretary of State Antony Blinken asking embassies and consular posts to promote the game. According to the site, the game was funded by the State Department’s Global Engagement Center and U.S. Embassy in The Hague. The game was released during UNESCO’s Global Media and Information Literacy Week. The memo states that the game is based on “inoculation theory.” Like an inoculation provides someone with enough exposure to a disease to build immunity, the game allows players to: “build cognitive resistance to disinformation in the real world. This concept is also known as ‘pre-bunking.’
The goal of Cat Park, the memo goes on to say, is to “proactively educate public audiences about common disinformation techniques, so players are better equipped to spot fake news no matter what form it takes.” The game is aimed at players aged 15 and up.
Just the News asked the Foundation For Freedom Online to analyze the game. The conclusion was that Cat Park: “gets young people to subliminally perceive that social media posts opposing government corruption are primarily done by disinformation purveyors.” Mike Benz, the Executive Director of the foundation and a former State official called the game “anti-populist.” In other words, young people are being taught not to believe any information except that which comes from acceptable sources.
Look, I have gone to court to cover news stories only to have to sit through the cases of people who were there for misdemeanors and refused to approach the bench. They refused to walk through the gate because they claimed that meant they were entering another jurisdiction. They also alleged that the gold fringe on the American flag was illegal. I’ve also taken phone calls from people who claimed that the Forest Service was working with the Japanese to build a biodome in the backcountry to house an alien invasion fleet. Those instances can be humorous, exasperating, and sometimes disturbing.
We know that man went to the moon and that the earth is not flat. We know the tragedy at Sandy Hook was not a government set-up and that a pedophile ring was not being run out of the basement of Comet Ping Pong. The restaurant doesn’t even have a basement. But we also know that the COVID-19 vaccines did not protect against infection, despite the propaganda and mandates. We know that the Hunter Biden laptop issue was real although the government worked with social media to suppress the story. We know that CRT was being taught in schools, even though we were originally told it was not, and that the “mostly peaceful riots” of 2020 were anything but.
We don’t need another Pizzagate to muddy the waters. And those kinds of stories can be used to smear conservatives as unrealistic, unhinged, and dangerous. But at the same time, efforts such as these can be used to condition people, particularly the next generation and maybe even the generation of voters after them to believe that any dissent could be fake news and that any whistleblower is a conspiracy theorist. The baby is thrown out with the bathwater, and ironically, censorship per se becomes unnecessary.
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