Have you noticed that the most famous people in media – the people with the most influential slots in top newspapers, with shows of their own in prime-time, voices first heard by Senators and CEOs and other key decision-makers – tend not to be all that bright?

Don’t get me wrong: they’re not dumb. The people who rise to positions of high influence in this business tend to be at least literate, and quick-minded enough not to drown on live television.

But, as is curiously the case with high-level politicians as well, top on-air personalities and print editorialists are never geniuses. They almost never say or write surprising things. They don’t dazzle or amaze.

You’d trust the average newspaper editorialist to be able to assemble an IKEA product, but the problem is their editorial arguments feel similarly designed, i.e. never too complicated for the average consumer to follow. In a way, it’s almost the same kind of quality control standard.

Even the age of the intellectual poseur is vanishing. There are no more William Safires or Bill Buckleys who made sure to remind you every few weeks or so that they like to read The Iliad and listen to Bach and expect you to know that Hilaire Belloc walked from Paris to Rome.

The last of this breed is probably George Will of the Washington Post, who writes about baseball to convince intellectuals he’s ordinary and writes about Byron to convince ordinary people he’s intellectual. Will was once the patron saint of conservatives who felt a need to rationalize meanness as smartness, but when Trump successfully ridiculed such people as phonies, Will lost his demographic niche.

Now he has been forced to try to rebrand himself as a kind of Democrat, using the same goofball Dennis Miller-isms he once used as a GOP attack dog, only in reverse (Trump, he wrote lately, is a “Vesuvius of mendacities”). It might work – people like David Frum and Bill Kristol have undergone similar re-brands, although they’ve hurled themselves at the ankles of Democratic Party orthodoxy far more enthusiastically than Will has. He’ll probably need to do the same to hang in there.

All of this is similar, in a less deadly way of course, to something George Orwell wrote about in 1984.

The book contains a character named Syme, a philologist co-worker of protagonist Winston Smith. Winston is terrified of Syme, because Syme is smart, which means he’s capable of detecting Winston’s secret thoughtcrime.

But Syme’s intelligence is of a particular, limited kind. He is fantastic at the job of dystopian propaganda, a master of the hideous intricacies of “Newspeak” and an ardent supporter of Big Brother: “In an intellectual way,” Orwell wrote, “he was venomously orthodox.”

Unlike Winston, who spent his days terrified of being found out as a secret human, Syme radiated confidence. He believed deeply in The Party, why would they ever snatch him up?

But in Airstrip One, being too smart in any way was an offense. Syme, Winston knew, would sooner or later be vaporized. The crime would not be the wrong politics, but simply having too functional a brain.

There’s an element of this with the press. The people in this business who are clever or original in any way – even in negative ways – almost always have comeuppances. They find themselves replaced by duller, meaner, more muddle-headed versions of themselves.

This is how you know there is a step down coming from Rush Limbaugh, a former top-40 deejay who occasionally seems like he cares more about nailing impersonations of people like Bill Clinton and John McCain than he does about the underlying vicious message.

Limbaugh is a Syme. He helped invent the modern right wing, and intellectually is about as venomous as they come. But that’s his problem: his schtick comes from his head, whereas this business likes people who think with their stomachs and gallbladders. It prefers herd animals to hunters.

Rush is still a titan of afternoon radio, even after losing many of his partnerships because he called Georgetown student Samantha Flake a “slut.” But his incessant bragging about his brilliance, his goofball chest-thumping about being “America’s anchorman” who is “literally indestructible,” a man of “zero mistakes” – all of those stylistic curlicues will be his undoing, because being capable of even quasi-irony is a strong predictor of trouble in this business.

Alex Jones was the obvious next devolutionary step after Rush, another fat-faced bully with broadcast skills, only significantly dumber and less self-aware. But even if he hadn’t been zapped by Silicon Valley (more on that crazy incident later) Jones would likely have flamed out, being too unstable and egotistical in the wrong ways.

Sean Hannity is the better template. He has no belief system, not even a negative one; he forms his opinions the way a cuttlefish changes colors, by unconsciously absorbing his professional surroundings. His ability to move from unquestioningly supporting George Bush to unquestioningly supporting Donald Trump (who hates Bush) is what makes him a superstar.

Thirty years from now, Hannity will be getting a tin medal from whoever is Reichsmarshall of the ex-United States by then, and that will identify him, not Rush, as “America’s anchorman.”

The kind of person who becomes a media institution, and spends retirement accepting awards and honorary doctorates, is the person who doesn’t have private thoughts or interests. We want that person’s mind full of brand names and framed pictures with ex-presidents. We want the person who can confess to Parade magazine that Cinnabon fumes “have a hold over me like crack cocaine would over an addict” because “I’m blissfully in love with food courts” (that’s Brian Williams).

It’s not an accident that people like Dave Chappelle and Jon Stewart, when you do see them in public today, look like Gulag escapees – beards, glassy eyes, speaking in cryptic self-help aphorisms, seemingly desperate to get the **** away somewhere. Having a sense of humor or a conscience or both in a high-profile media job is a quick way to end up wandering New York or some distant farm, Vincent Gigante-style, in a bathrobe and stubble.

In a nation of 300 million people, the handful of men and women we pick to be our leading opinion merchants are almost universally terrible writers. They don’t inspire, challenge, lyricize, or make us laugh. Why would media companies steeped in money go so far out of their way to hire the most absolutely mediocre thinkers they can find? What’s the value-add?

John Kenneth Galbraith, who invented the term conventional wisdom, stressed that the two most important qualities in the brand of non-thought he was describing were acceptability and predictability. Just as FBI profilers can guess the perpetrator of crimes by looking at victimology, you can reverse-engineer your way to popular op-ed stances just by looking at audiences and figuring what points of view are most likely to please them.

Writers like New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and cohort David Brooks are perfect examples. Friedman, whose target audience is upscale New Yorkers and international businesspeople, has been writing the same “Capitalism, surprisingly, works!” column for thirty years.

In 2002, Slate ran a story about why Friedman was the most important columnist in the world. “He’s effective not because he sounds like a historian, but because he sounds like an advertisement. Friedman has no ideas that can’t be expressed in a catchphrase,” author David Plotz wrote, in a piece that was genuinely intended to be complimentary.

Brooks meanwhile wrote an entire book called Bobos in Paradise about how rich New Yorkers had achieved the apex in consumer taste. This was like Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History, except the Brooks version was The End of the History of Buying Tasteful Furniture.

Lineups full of themes like this are designed to make sure that readers – particularly upper-class readers – are never surprised or offended when they click on an op-ed page. Humor is discouraged because humor is inherently iconoclastic and trains audiences to think even powerful people are ridiculous (or at least as ridiculous as everyone else, which of course is a taboo thought).

In all this is the solution to the oft-contemplated mystery of why columnists are never fired for being wrong. It’s not true – you can be fired for being wrong. You just can’t be fired for being wrong in concert. If you go back and look, you’ll find that many of America’s highest-profile media figures are not only wrong very frequently, but absurdly so. But their saving grace is that the wrong things they express are the same wrong things everyone else is expressing.

The editorial opinions you’re exposed to most often are not individual human points of view, but aggregated distillations of conventional wisdom. There is no punishment, ever, for going too far in pushing this form of market-tested non-thought.

The most powerful example of this was the Iraq War.

* * * *

Despite what people in the business may claim today, the Iraq War story was not a tough call for reporters. The case for war against was always ridiculous and never rested on anything as compelling even as the bogus Gulf of Tonkin charade, which itself was a towering monument to the slavish stupidity of the American press.

Vietnam was a great example of how immediately consensus forms around even the most suspicious narratives. That war was allegedly triggered by the “unprovoked” and “deliberate” attack of North Vietnamese gunboats against American naval vessels on August 2, 1964, followed by an alleged second “torpedo” attack on August 4 (which we now know never happened).

When Lyndon Johnson gave his speech on August 4 about how, in the face of this second attack, “even limited military action” was “indispensable today for peace,” he was cheered – universally – by credulous media.

The L.A. Times wrote that Americans must “face the fact that the Communists, by their attack on American vessels in international waters, have themselves escalated the hostilities.” The New York Times lauded Johnson for presenting “the American people last night with the somber facts.”

The Washington Post went further. This is typical: the press, if it protests a government action, will usually wonder why it’s behaved with too much restraint. The Post wondered why Johnson and the U.S. had been satisfied with “limited action, a sort of tit-for-tat retaliation.” It noted that the only “mystery here” was whether “the attacks by North Vietnamese… were part of some larger scheme on the Communist side to escalate the war.”

Projection alert! Seven years later, in June of 1971, documents leaked that it was the United States, not North Vietnam, that had been planning a “D-Day” for nearly half a year before Tonkin.

We had troop buildups, covert sabotage operations from land and sea, and even a National Security Memorandum written as far back as March of 1964 laying out our extensive military plans.

But articles from the Post and the Times about these revelations years later did not include re-examinations of the papers’ own complicity in selling a bogus war. This is a key part of how this system works. The institutional memory of the press about credulous acceptance of government nonsense is nonexistent, so we continually repeat the same errors.

The pretext for invading Iraq was many orders of magnitude more ridiculous than Vietnam. It’s worth going into this in a little detail, since we know a lot now about what went into the government’s thinking back then. In hindsight, the behavior of the cream of the press corps wasn’t just embarrassing, it would have been disqualifying in any functioning society.

* * * *

After 9/11 the Bush administration was frantically searching for a response that would split the baby between strategies of “containment” and “democracy.” We know this in large part because the man charged with selling the war argument to the public, then-speechwriter David Frum, wrote a book about how he came up with his sales pitch called The Right Man, a sickening, ballwashing homage to his former boss, George W. Bush.

According to Frum, the Bush administration was plagued with narrow-minded foreign policy “realists” whose plan for securing stability in the Middle East relied upon cooperation with regimes that may have been wanting in areas like human (and especially women’s) rights, but were at least interested in “modernization.”

Frum described holdovers in the Bush camp who were fixated on finding modern versions of Kemal Ataturk, the Turkish leader who wiped out theocracy and turned Turkey into a reliable ally of the United States, if not a paragon of democracy and human rights.

“For half a century,” Frum wrote, “the State Department had been searching for the next Ataturk, and at one point or another its fancy had lighted on Egypt’s Nasser, Suharto in Indonesia, the Shah of Iran, even (we must admit the horrible truth) Saddam Hussein in Iraq.”

Note that many of those alliances – particularly with Suharto – had led to America being implicated in war crimes, human rights disasters, even genocide. But: pragmatism!

There was a conscious choice to embrace leaders of this type as opposed to pushing for self-determination in these regions. The thinking was that autocratic regimes that committed to American-inspired goals like getting rich and building big-ass skyscrapers would be better bets as allies than “democratic” regimes, since democracy in that part of the world would likely result in a slew of Islamist America-haters coming to power.

One of the reasons we believed that was the experience of Algeria. In 1991, the Islamic Salvation Front won popular elections in the former French Colony, horrifying Western powers. The United States and France immediately gave their blessing to a brutal Algerian military coup. Islamist leaders were rounded up, tossed in Saharan “detention camps,” and tortured, for starters, triggering a brutal civil war that raged for years.

Because of this experience, not much credence was given to the idea of helping spread democracy in Iraq. Frum (emphasis mine): “Democracy in the Middle East? asked the realists sarcastically… Who do you think would win an unrigged election in Egypt? In Jordan? In Pakistan? In Saudi Arabia?”

Nonetheless, the “realist” approach wasn’t satisfactory either. We were bitter about Arab attitudes. Here we were, lavishing money and weaponry on vicious local Khans, and they couldn’t even get their populations to like us! Bush at one point was convinced Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf was the “next Ataturk,” but to Frum’s delight, Musharraf turned out to be just another crappy dictator who barely had sovereign control of the vast territories outside his palace.

This opened Bush’s eyes to the fact that in seeking “modernizing strongmen,” we often were allying ourselves with people who were neither modern nor strong.

Bush’s disenchantment with Musharraf (called by one Middle Eastern journalist friend of mine Pervez “I shot Musharraf, but I did not shoot the deputy”) helped push the president down the road of democratization, as a kind of co-goal with “stability.”

The problem was, an actual plan to deliver democracy and, say, women’s rights to the entire region would have left us virtually without allies across the entire Middle East. Specifically we’d have been cut off from “friends” in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, and other places.

So our list of targets for democratization necessarily had to be small, and the one major power in the region that was not currently a U.S.-armed, U.S.-funded, U.S.-backed repressor of its own people was Iraq. Well, Iran, too, but the United States didn’t want to fully back a popular uprising there after years of courting would-be moderates around President Khatami.

So the policy became the invasion of Iraq. The justification, as we all know now, was Iraq’s place as a key member of the “Axis of Evil.”

Frum developed this catchphrase (it was originally the “Axis of hatred”) based upon agonizing, brain-twisting reviews of the history of World War II. He dove into history in an attempt to find a way to answer two very logical anticipated objections to the invasion of Iraq.

The first was that there was no real link between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 bombers. The implication that such a link existed was silly for a lot of reasons. Secular strongmen like Hussein were if anything more hated enemies of Islamist groups like al-Qaeda than even the United States. In fact, initial reports of contacts between al-Qaeda and Iraq in the nineties turned out to be attempts by Hussein to get bin Laden’s group to stop supporting insurgents in places like Kurdistan.

The other problem was that Hussein, though a bad man, and very recently our own ally (whom we supported as he was using sarin gas and other banned weapons against Iran), was easily contained. As Frum put it, if our policy toward the much stronger and more threatening Soviet Union had been containment, why did we need to invade tinpot Saddam?

To these objections Frum believed he found an answer. Terror groups and states like Iraq may not be natural allies, he said, but neither were Japan and Germany (although in fact, they absolutely were, and were united by virtually identical ideologies of racial superiority). What united these groups, he said, was not, you know, actual unity, but the fact that they all hated and resented the United States in more or less equal measure.

As for containment, Frum again found solace in World War II. Evil actors, he said, did not always behave rationally. Japan attacked us despite having no chance at victory. Frum here conveniently left out the Export Control Act of 1940 and Roosevelt’s oil embargo, which, though correct policies, created an absolutely logical reason for the Japanese – already committed to a massive military incursion on the Asian mainland – to attack the U.S. to break through its natural-resource blockade. But in Frum’s mind, Japan was just unpredictably crazy.

Meanwhile, Frum wrote, the lunatic Hitler attacked Britain and Russia simultaneously, suicidal moves. So, you never knew. The only way to be absolutely sure you would never have to go to war with a dangerous and unpredictable adversary was to go to war with them.

Think about this premise for a moment. Our entire reason for taking action in the Middle East was supposedly an effort to respond to 9/11. But the stated justification for invading Iraq was made precisely knowing the absence of a connection between Iraq and 9/11.

Worse, our justification for invasion of a country whose ambitions even regionally had been successfully contained with relative ease since 1991 was that it was a mistake to take reason into account when it came to foreign policy, because who knows with people?

So we went public with plans to stop the “Axis of Evil,” which contained one country with an actual nuclear program, another country with an extensive history of sponsoring terrorism against the United States, and – Iraq. Frum/Bush told the press that we were ignoring the nuke state and the known terror sponsor and going after the successfully-contained ex-ally.

The best “evidence” for an Iraq-9/11 link was a fourth- or fifth-hand report of bomber Mohammed Atta supposedly meeting with Iraqis in Prague that even American intelligence officials wouldn’t vouch for anonymously: it showed up in American news reports nonetheless in 2001 and 2002, attributed to Czech sources. There were even reports that Atta and the Iraqis conspired to blow up the Radio Free Europe building in Prague.

As is so often the case, years after, when it was too late, reports surfaced explaining that all of this had been bullshit. In 2004, James Risen of the New York Times (he also ran a skeptical piece in 2002) ran an article that drilled down into the Atta-in-Prague stories and revealed that, quelle surprise, no one could corroborate the original report.

The oft-cited tale of Atta conspiring with Iraqis in the Czech Republic apparently had been based upon a single unnamed third-hand foreign source, who didn’t say anything to Czech investigators until after seeing Atta’s picture in the paper following 9/11.

As for the threat of Iraq, the Bush administration was forced to get creative. Bush gave an address in October of 2002 in which he claimed “Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical and biological weapons across broad areas,” adding, “We’re concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs for missions targeting the United States.”

Since real military unmanned aerial vehicles at the time had extremely limited ranges, the Bush regime was essentially playing around in public with goofy hypotheticals – like the idea that an Iraqi operative would sneak into the United States and deploy a small remote-control device to spray poisons in remote population centers, because — wait, why?

“Smaller cities and towns that would be more vulnerable,” is how Fox put it.

Virtually no one in the large commercial press said any of this was ridiculous. Nor did anyone bother to unspool the broader insane logic underpinning the argument for war. Why Iraq? Why not North Korea or Iran? For that matter, why not Saudi Arabia?

Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers had been Saudis. Osama bin Laden was Saudi. The Saudi government had only “selectively” cooperated with the U.S. in investigating the bombings. One of the convicted conspirators, Zacarias Moussasoui, had told authorities several members of the Saudi Royal family helped finance the attacks. The U.S. government at the time had evidence of direct financial ties between Saudi Prince Bandar and at least two of the 9/11 bombers.

Any one of these pieces of information, if delivered to this media corps back then, could have been spun instantly into fire-breathing pretexts for invading Saudi Arabia.

But Saudi Arabia was a U.S. ally. We were not going to be in the business or replacing all undemocratic regimes in the area, just the one disposable one.

The key to the administration’s strategy was conquering the liberal press. Bush had lost the popular vote in 2000. He had a strong mandate after 9/11, but it would be a bit of an uphill climb to get the entire government behind such a radically idiotic foreign policy scheme.

So what did they do? They didn’t target Fox News or the Washington Times for leaks about Saddam’s supposed nuke program. They picked the New York Times, which had a rich history of reprinting the assertions of unnamed intelligence sources.

Knowing that reporters fall to pieces before anyone with a security-state title, they picked the most ambitious and aggressive reporter out there, Judith Miller, and fed her years of continuous horseshit. One of the key stories was called “U.S. Says Hussein Intensified Quest for A-Bomb Parts”.

In a later mea culpa piece about this story, the Times editors wrote:

The claim came not from defectors but from the best American intelligence sources available at the time.

This story was actually worse than the many stories Miller wrote that appeared to be sourced to con-men like “defector” Ahmad Chalabi. Much of the Iraq case was so disreputable that even Bush administration officials – people otherwise unafraid to go out in public and claim Saddam Hussein was planning on sneaking spies into America to release mini-drones to spray poison over one-stoplight towns in flyover country – refused to even be quoted as unnamed sources in a lot of the worst Times stories.

As was the case with the Atta-Prague story, they instead made sure news stories were ultimately sourced to foreigners.

But in the “aluminum tubes” piece, they had high-ranking officials whisper the awful truth about Saddam’s nukes to Miller. The Times even let the administration test-market a couple of propaganda lines, allowing off-the-record sources to insist:

The first sign of a “smoking gun,” they argue, may be a mushroom cloud.

Of course, the information in the article was completely unverifiable. But a little-known secret of American journalism is that we regularly allow security sources to make unverifiable claims in print, provided these sources have the right titles from the right agencies.

It’s a rare thing for a reporter to extract from intelligence sources a story the government does not want on the front pages. In fact, one of the few cases where this sort of reporting panned out ushered in an era of openly adversarial relations between the intelligence community and the press. This skewed relationship has persisted to this day, with the press never really catching on.

In the summer of 1962, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Hanson Baldwin of the New York Times ran a story clearly sourced to unnamed CIA contacts that accurately described the contents of a recent national intelligence estimate, which among other things concluded that the Soviets were building concrete bunkers for ICBM sites.

John F. Kennedy – not Richard Nixon, but Kennedy – asked CIA director John McCone to create a task force to spy on domestic targets like Baldwin and four other reporters. We know for sure that Kennedy, Nixon, and George W. Bush all conducted illegal surveillance of American reporters (which is expressly prohibited by the agency’s charter), often using foreign intelligence authority to do so.

The government has always viewed the press as a tool to be distrusted, watched, and then used, or not, as operations and policy demanded. Many stories that received significant amounts of ink were pure fictions handed to the press by official sources with agendas.

These often involved scare stories designed to rally public interest in war or funding the military. The famed “missile gap” of the fifties and early sixties was such an invention. In 1960, the CIA told the President the Soviets would have five hundred intercontinental missiles ready to hit the U.S. by 1961. The Soviet Union actually had four.

Official sources, particularly in the intelligence community, had a long and storied history of lying before Iraq. They lied about their role in the overthrow of democratically-elected Chilean president Salvador Allende (CIA director Richard Helms was convicted of lying to Congress in that affair). They lied about countless other coups, arms for hostages, and other scandals.

In 1986, in an incident reporters seem not to remember, the Washington Post got hold of a memo written by Ronald Reagan’s National Security Adviser, John Poindexter. He outlined an elaborate plan targeting Muammar Qaddafi that involved using the press to spread lies. The memo read:

One of the key elements [of the new strategy] is that it combines real and illusionary events – through a disinformation program – with the basic goal of making Gadhafi think that there is a high degree of internal opposition to him within Libya, that his key trusted aides are disloyal, that the U.S. is about to move against him militarily.

So the Reagan administration salted papers like the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post with bogus tales about how Libya was backing new terrorist initiatives. In fact, the CIA had secretly concluded Qaddafi was “quiescent” on the terror front at the time.

This is the kind of thing that might prompt one to add a disclaimer to future CIA-sourced stories: “A official source whose employers have repeatedly spied on and lied to this particular newspaper claimed today…”

Instead, news outlets continually grant government sources the privilege of passing on un-checkable claims under the veil of anonymity and respectability. In the Judith Miller episode, the Times’ excuse that it was relying on the “best American intelligence sources available at the time” just underscored the routine nature of this brand of malpractice. The best American intel sources are still historically very unreliable.

Hilariously, the usual method for “checking” intelligence claims is to get another unnamed intelligence source on the phone to say exactly what his or her boss just said, followed perhaps by someone recently in retirement parroting the same info. In other words, you’re getting the same story from three or four connected, unnamed sources.

Next time you pick up the New York Times, see if you can spot this attribution pattern. Look for a sexy claim followed by a line like “according to officials familiar with the intelligence.” In recent years it’s become fashionable for some reason to cite four unnamed sources.

Four sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? It must have to the trio of Times reporters who ran a piece called “Trump Campaign Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence” in February of 2017. Their attribution was “according to four current and former American officials.” What could be more solid?

Except about a half a year later, former FBI chief James Comey went on the record to tell that same group of reporters the story, in the main, “was not true.” Again, this wasn’t four independent sources getting something wrong. It was likely one institutional source spreading a shaky story through four conduits, not the same thing. This is a sales trick used to make takes go down more easily with the public.

This is not a comment on Russiagate reporting as a whole. It’s just an example of something that could have taken place in any era, on any subject.

Stories sourced this way often turn out to be true, or close enough. A recent CNN report about the Jamal Khashoggi mess turned out to be relatively accurate, but was still a sourcing triple-axel: it cited “a source” who said “Turkish officials” had “told their American counterparts” they were “in possession” of “video and audio evidence” proving the Washington Post columnist had been executed inside the Saudi consulate.

To recap: one unnamed person says other unnamed foreign people (in this case, Turkish intelligence officials with an even more appalling history of public lying than our own security agencies) told a third group of unnamed people about documentary evidence the reporters were not allowed to see or hear. This isn’t going out on a limb, it’s going out on three or four limbs. But we run this kind of stuff all the time. It’s the journalistic version of unsafe sex, and with multiple partners to boot.

The Khashoggi story turned out mostly okay. But the WMD reporting in the Iraq era routinely came up snake eyes.

Right-wing war supporters naturally bought every premise without question. Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard reported Saddam was “past that finish line” in his nuke program, adding that, “Very few wars in American history were prepared better or more thoroughly than this one.”

Richard Perle, a.k.a. the Prince of Darkness, told TV audiences, “The Iraqis will welcome the liberators with open arms.”

Robert Kagan, in the Washington Post, wrote, “The American view—that only force can secure democracy and international order—is correct, so we should topple Saddam now.”

On the flip side, Harvard’s Michael Ignatieff wrote an influential piece in the Times that was essentially the liberal intellectual companion to the Miller reporting. It provided the moral and political justification for invasion. Ignatieff’s take was, yes, this was an imperial conquest, but a new, good kind:

America’s empire is not like empires of times past, built on colonies, conquest and the white man’s burden. We are no longer in the era of the United Fruit Company, when American corporations needed the Marines to secure their investments overseas. The twenty-first century imperium is a new invention in the annals of political science, an empire lite, a global hegemony whose grace notes are free markets, human rights, and democracy.

This wasn’t so much an idea as just a re-framing of reality. Yes, this is imperial colonial conquest, which we previously considered unjustifiable and monstrous, but the Iraq invasion was a “new invention,” a benevolent imperial conquest.

It was similar to the buzz that swept the financial community in the late nineties. Then, economists who worried about unsustainable growth in tech stocks were told that in Internet era, we had entered a “new paradigm” where the old laws of economic gravity no longer applied.

When that idea exploded in disaster with the tech crash, it took just a couple of years for the same idiotic argument to re-appear vis a vis real estate prices, which we were told would ascend infinitely. A few commenters cheekily noted the re-emergence of a “new new paradigm,” but mostly finance pundits jumped on the cheering section and sent us careening toward even worse disaster in 2008.

Ignatieff’s piece about the Iraq invasion was liberal America’s version of a “new paradigm” argument in foreign policy, in which nonsensical unprovoked war now became sensible. Coupled with the thin reed of WMD reports, it was enough to get even the would-be liberals of the Upper West Side hooting for war.

People like Tom Friedman were for the war, of course. He famously told Iraq to “Suck on this” show of force, explaining that doing the irrational was sometimes necessary, because “It’s O.K. to throw out your steering wheel as long as you remember you’re driving without one.”

That isn’t true – you actually can’t drive a car without a steering wheel even if you know you’re doing it – but no editor flagged it as a problem line. Why would they? Friedman won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary that year. The fact that he declared “the next six months will be critical” fourteen times during the war is much laughed about today, but it’s actually a serious comment on how long delusions are allowed to persist, provided they’re the right delusions.

David Brooks, then with the Weekly Standard, attacked the reasoning of war critics:

“Are the risks of killing Saddam greater or less than the risks of tolerating him? Instead of facing the real options, [peace advocates] fill the air with evasions, distractions, and gestures – a miasma of insults and verbiage that distract from the core issue.”

In the blink of an eye, we went from tolerating Saddam Hussein without any trouble at all to needing to kill him immediately in self defense, with people like Brooks insisting that anyone who said otherwise was just refusing to face the irrefutable math.

How about the upscale quasi-liberal crowd? Here’s David Remnick of the New Yorker, one of the most influential members of the American conventional wisdom Central Committee:

History will not easily excuse us if, by deciding not to decide, we defer a reckoning with an aggressive totalitarian leader who intends not only to develop weapons of mass destruction but also to use them.

Remnick, like Rush, is a Syme. He’s no idiot. He surely knew he could not actually report that Saddam not only “intended” to develop WMDs, but “use them.” Like Hillary Clinton, who later blithely conceded that votes for the war and against the subsequent surge were essentially political decisions, Remnick went with the herd opinion for purely intellectual reasons. His editorial on the subject reads like the forced confession of a downed pilot.

How about Chris Matthews of MSNBC? We think of him today as part of the blue-state cheering section, and not long ago he was insisting re: Iraq he had been “a voice against this bullshit war from the beginning.”

Except he spent most of the Iraq years gushing over how manly George Bush was. The Hardball chattering head railed against “carpers and complainers” who opposed the war and went so far as to say chicks dig a desert conqueror:

“Everybody sort of likes the president, except for the real whack-jobs,” he said, adding: “He won the war. He was an effective commander. Everybody recognizes that, I believe, except a few critics... Women like a guy who’s president. Check it out. The women like this war. I think we like having a hero as our president.”

How about Nicholas Kristof of the Times, revered today as a #Resistance darling of blue-state mores? Here he is denouncing Michael Moore for questioning Bush’s pronouncements on Iraq:

“I’m just raising what I think is a legitimate question,” Mr. Moore told me, a touch defensively, adding, “I’m just posing a question.”

Right. And right-wing nuts were “just posing a question” about whether Mr. Clinton was a serial killer.

Then there’s Jeffrey Goldberg, who for some reason has been chosen as the only person to be infamous for supporting the war in exactly the same manner as all his colleagues. It’s not exactly fair, but it’s not like he was ever within the ballpark of right on the issue, either.

Writing in the New Yorker early in the war years, he conceded there was, “some debate among arms-control experts about exactly when Saddam will have nuclear capabilities. But there is no disagreement that Iraq, if unchecked, will have them soon ... There is little doubt what Saddam might do with an atomic bomb or with his stocks of biological and chemical weapons.”

All of this represented a classic Manufacturing Consent-type theme, where the range of acceptable opinion was limited to an absurd degree.

The two takes were: on the right, Saddam will definitely nuke us so invade immediately. On the left, Saddam will definitely nuke us, so we must with heavy heart invade – but only once the dog-and-pony show of international inspections has had time to fail.

None of these voices, with the exception of Miller, earned a rep for irresponsibility or wrongness. Most of them are still media darlings.

Kristol is one of the most oft-booked guests in TV, appearing on CNN, MSNBC, Morning Joe, Meet the Press, and other shows. Goldberg was named Editor-in-Chief of The Atlantic. Frum, one of the people most responsible for the catastrophe of Iraq, is enjoying a rebrand as a Trump critic. Remnick still runs the New Yorker. Matthews still pilots Hardball. You can still read Kristof denouncing Trump in the pages of the Times and eulogizing John McCain for (sort of) opposing torture, a practice that incidentally we began using openly only when we launched the war Kristof supported.

The Iraq catastrophe had nothing to do with ideology. It was about groupthink.

Media critics today are so desperate to find evidence for bias against their tribes, be they on the right or the left.

But the real divisions in the press have to do with other descriptors: small versus big, independent versus corporate, originality versus orthodoxy, solo opinion versus collective wisdom.

Iraq was idiotic on its face. It wasn’t a hard call. But the people who got it wrong for years on end to don’t have to wear the scarlet letter of journalistic unreliability.

That is reserved for the people who opposed the war, like Jesse Ventura (who was un-hired by MSNBC when they found out he was opposed to the invasion), Michael Moore (the “very definition of an unreliable narrator,” says film critic Richard Schlickel), and former intelligence officials like the group VIPS, or Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, who earned permanent kook status when they got together in 2003 to pen an open letter questioning the Iraq intel.

There are two kinds of wrong in journalism: wrong in the tent, and wrong outside it. If you’re wrong outside, expect to be branded a conspiracy theorist.

But inside the tent there is a church, whose members enjoy lifelong ecclesiastical privileges. In the bosom of the Church of Averageness, even repeat inaccuracies will not lose you your job. The only crime is trying to punch above not just your own intellect, but everyone else’s.

Many believe Iraq-style collective delusions are less possible today, because the post-Trump universe is so divided. This is a misread of how this all works. If anything, the Church of the Average is stronger than ever. The greater the political stress, the more the public is subjected to even stricter and more ridiculous enforcement of conventional wisdom. We place a great premium today on not thinking for oneself, and not temporarily, so as to green-light one war, but generally — on the grounds that free thinking has not worked out so well for America of late, and therefore must be discouraged.

Don’t believe me?

Check out the following examples, starting next week…