How a Satire Becomes a Hoax

Jacob Sullum | January 12, 2005

On Friday blogger Kurt Nimmo, in a post entitled "Opposing Bush: A Form of Mental Illness?," picked up an item from the satirical Swift Report and treated it as a genuine news story:

"When the 109th Congress convenes in Washington in January, Senator Bill Frist, the first practicing physician elected to the Senate since 1928, plans to file a bill that would define 'political paranoia' as a mental disorder, paving the way for individuals who suffer from paranoid delusions regarding voter fraud, political persecution and FBI surveillance to receive Medicare reimbursement for any psychiatric treatment they receive," writes Hermione Slatkin, Medical Correspondent for the Swift Report. "Rick Smith, a spokesman for Senator Frist, says that the measure has a good chance of passing--something that can only help a portion of the population that is suffering significant distress."

"If you're still convinced that President Bush won the election because Republicans figured out a way to hack into electronic voting machines, you've obviously got a problem," says Smith. "If we can figure out a way to ease your suffering by getting you into therapy and onto medication, that's something that we hope the entire 109th Congress will support."

Nimmo, author of Another Day in the Empire: Life in Neoconservative America, connected the alleged bill to other political uses of psychiatry, citing an article of mine (which is how I happened to notice the post in the first place). Although he noted toward the end that "I could not find mention of Frist and the classification of 'political paranoia' after a lengthy Google news search," and "Rick Smith's above quote returned no results," he added: "This does not mean that Bill Frist and the Republicans do not consider the opposition--including more than a few Democrats--as mental cases and tinfoil hatters. Rush Limbaugh calls us nutters every day and millions of gullible Americans take what he says as gospel."

Gullible Americans clearly are not limited to Rush Limbaugh fans. This week Nimmo's little essay was reposted at Infoshop News and sf.indymedia.org. (Alan Cantwell at Conspiracy Planet also seems to have taken the Swift Report joke at face value.) I'm not sure whether the propagation of this unintentional hoax says more about 1) psychiatry, 2) Republican rhetoric, or 3) the leftist opposition.

Comments

Warren|1.12.05 @ 12:04PM|#

I think it says more about the ubiquity of gullibility.

|1.12.05 @ 12:10PM|#

I think it says more about satirical writers and how good they have gotten over the years.

|1.12.05 @ 12:12PM|#

This happens all the time. Doug Bandow on Townhall.com just wrote a column working himself into a froth about some unkind words written about fetuses on blamebush.com. The problem being, blamebush.com is a satirical website on which a Bush-loving rightist attempts to parody the writings of liberals.

digamma|1.12.05 @ 12:19PM|#

Uh, there actually WAS a study saying conservatism is mental illness.

|1.12.05 @ 12:19PM|#

Aww shucks. I was hoping this would eventually lead to some ADA entitlements for my conservative views.

|1.12.05 @ 12:27PM|#

No, digimamma, there was a study saying that conservative opinions about politics correlated with certain other opinions and habits of mind. No claims of mental illness were made.

Which, surprise, was seized on by conservative politicians and their groupies to futher their "we're so persecuted" campaign.

digamma|1.12.05 @ 12:32PM|#

Joe: The avoidance of uncertainty, for example, as well as the striving for certainty, are particularly tied to one key dimension of conservative thought - the resistance to change or hanging onto the status quo, they said.

On many issues, can that not be said about leftists?

|1.12.05 @ 12:39PM|#

digimamma, I think it's phrased poorly. I'm not defending the study's quality, just pointing out that your characterization of it, claiming that it defined conservatism as mental illness, is untrue.

rox_publius|1.12.05 @ 12:43PM|#

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smart move there, kurt.

|1.12.05 @ 1:04PM|#

Nimmo could use the Tawana Brawley defense. 'It doesn't matter if it is true, it is symbolic of what we believe to be true.'

|1.12.05 @ 1:27PM|#

They've got to have something to put in the upcoming DSM-V, may as well start laying the groundwork now.

I suspect that the seemingly increasing prescience of satirical sites like the Onion are largely due to people acting and speaking in ridiculous fashion more and more frequently. But the gullibility never hurts either.

gaius marius|1.12.05 @ 2:37PM|#

as some have said, decadence is the state of civilization when the absurd becomes normal.

people are gullible to this sort of thing particularly because truth and satire have converged rapidly since the start of the 20th c.

|1.12.05 @ 2:58PM|#

people are gullible to this sort of thing particularly because truth and satire have converged rapidly since the start of the 20th c.

Bastiat might say that satire and truth converged in Europe long before then...

gaius marius|1.12.05 @ 3:07PM|#

lol, mr goiter, indeed he may have -- but then, for all his brilliance, there is something deeply absurd in the unquestioning worship of an unevidenced "natural" right of private property that renders all actual government immoral.

|1.12.05 @ 3:14PM|#

i don't disagree with your current analysis mr. marius, except i find it very hard to believe that government has ever been less ridiculous. it's just that more people are in on the joke than ever before, have more access to more information (or noise, whatever you'd like to call it) than ever before and are teetering on the brink of The Great Unknowing. which is sort of my version of an eschaton, except very happy and sort of chaotic and without all the god and flying dragons with dead heads and stuff.

|1.12.05 @ 3:19PM|#

lol, mr goiter, indeed he may have -- but then, for all his brilliance, there is something deeply absurd in the unquestioning worship of an unevidenced "natural" right of private property that renders all actual government immoral.

I didn't comment on his views, only his ability to use near-truth satire.

Larry Yudelson|1.12.05 @ 6:04PM|#

Well, here's a psychiatrist who recently testified beforew Congress (on pornography) approvingly quoting a claim that liberalism is brain damage.

The Lonewacko Blog|1.12.05 @ 10:03PM|#

Here's an excerpt from the press release for the Berkeley study: Hitler, Mussolini, and former President Ronald Reagan were individuals, but all were right-wing conservatives because they preached a return to an idealized past and condoned inequality in some form. Talk host Rush Limbaugh can be described the same way...

Much more information here.

|1.13.05 @ 9:51AM|#

God, that's silly. Hitler and Mussolini, conservatives. Yeah, tell it to the military brass.

|1.18.05 @ 1:01PM|#

I think it's great that we have people giving the neocons a taste of their own medicine.

|1.23.05 @ 10:17PM|#

The fact that the Republicans were willing to provide government funded medical care should have been a dead give away it wasn't real.