The Scooby Doo of Misinformation

Rip off that mask, and find the real liars

One of the recurring cliches and tropes of the Scooby Doo cartoon franchise (common to every animated series based on the original Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? CBS series launched in 1969) is the mask reveal.

The mask reveal usually comes near the end of an episode in which Fred, Daphne, Velma, Shaggy and of course Scooby himself have been investigating some mysterious event, usually involving a ghost, haunt or spirit. Invariably, the supernatural creature terrorizing people turns out to be a greedy little man with some reason to cover up perfectly mundane but criminal activities using a ghost outfit and a dash of am-dram theatrics to do so.

The operating assumption of the Joe Ruby/Ken Spears written series produced by the Hanna-Barbara studio was that all bank robbers, crooks, illegal land developers, escaped convicts and unpleasant neighbors were really frustrated actors itching to concoct some elaborate make-believe to scare people away from the real truth.

In a sense, the whole thing was a children’s version of one strand of much older Gothic literature. For while today we associate the Gothic with purple prose and genuinely supernatural villains, perhaps with occult or demonic horrors that (within the fiction) are supposed to be real, we forget that Gothic literature (like the Marquis de Sade’s systemised and exhaustive accounts of sexual perversion) were products of the Enlightenment.

The Gothic was also always partly about what Poe would term ‘ratiocination’, the activity of the mind when investigating, analyzing, scientifically evaluating and categorizing the world around it. Half the Gothic tales ever written, at least, were cathartic rationalizations-ones where the supernatural mystery turned out to have a mundane explanation, and where the horrors depicted were, in the end, neatly resolved and cozily tidied away leaving the reader once more secure in a rational and explicable universe.

It’s no accident that the writer who most straddles the historic point where Gothic fiction merges into a broader river of ‘dark’ topics covered by modern horror, Edgar Allan Poe, is also the writer whom might be said to have invented the modern detective genre in his creation of the obsessively brilliant detective C.Auguste Dupin (so clearly influential on the most famous detective of all, Sherlock Holmes). Poe wrote Gothic pieces, horror pieces, and works that mix astute psychological analysis of extreme states with frantic drama in sometimes luridly overwrought prose. The Poe style of ever heightening narrative exclamation (present in both the tales and the poems) is both about losing rational control and gaining it simultaneously.

As a writer it would lead to people wondering if Poe himself might be mentally disturbed (creating a Byronic legend of Poe as American template of the haunted artist) that would be fed by his tragic personal relationships, poverty, relatively early death and the mysterious circumstances of his final days. Poe himself became a Gothic character, in a way that made him intensely attractive to poets like Baudelaire. But at the same time Poe’s stories are stylistically very tightly controlled, the result of skilled consideration even in their histrionics, and Poe the writer was a theorist of the craft he practiced. In content, he includes the mad serial killer and the insane aristocrat…but also the methodical investigator and the hyper-rational detective. In the mastery of style, he contradicts the extremes of topic.

All of this, rather weirdly, is also a nest of complications in something as simple as a bright 1960’s and 1970’s child’s cartoon series, because Poe established that the supernatural always stands ready to threaten the natural order, while the natural order is always equally ready to dismiss the supernatural. These are the twin poles of the Gothic and the Detective, of disorder and order, and of a world that makes no sense contrasted with a world that follows definable and predictable rules. The most sedate detective fiction begins with the horror of death and murder. The most reassuring detective narrative exposing and punishing evil needs that evil to itself exist and have a purpose.

In an even broader sense, these are the poles we navigate ourselves, in our personal morality, between our darkest undisclosed urges and our brightest rational achievements, or that any particular ideology navigates between its meek dissolution and its most fanatical violent expression.

The mask reveal is the most reassuring of all contrivances. It is the simple explanation that restores the sense of order. And that also assures us that the dominant order is not itself to blame for the eruptions of extremes, the presence of evil, or the crimes which have occurred.

Now, then, to the political point of all this, which I hope has not been too long delayed.

It seems to me that if you look at modern mainstream attitudes to truth, you are presented with a series of mask reveals where what you have seen with your own eyes is treated as if it were a captured supernatural entity in a Scooby Doo episode. The authorities hold this figure bound. They whip off its mask, and they tell you that underneath is the true villain of the piece.

Haha! Your objection to mass immigration and your insistence on borders is white supremacism!

Haha! Your objection and protest when faced with a stolen election is violent insurrection! You are the villain of the piece!

Haha! Your desire for a reasonable standard of living and affordable energy bills and a government that doesn’t wreck the entire cheap energy basis of modern civilization is planetary vandalism! Your hamburger is killing the planet!

All of these political mask reveals are attempts to confirm and reenact an order of things that ordinary people don’t want. But they can’t return us to normality, they can’t reassure us in any way that the world makes sense again….because they are themselves untrue and themselves insane.

And easily the most complicated and compromised versions of these failing attempts to restore our faith in the worldview of our masters comes with the subject of truth itself, and the new proliferation of the invented terms misinformation, disinformation and malinformation.

All across the western world today we see a war on free speech busily conducted by the establishment ruling class, by the people sitting in government, the people funding political campaigns, and by the people who are the paid professional servants of the preceding groups (like journalists and technocratic experts). We have new online protections, hate speech definitions, and thought control measures in every major western nation. It’s on this basis too that social media magnates who refuse to be controlled censors are arrested (the CEO of Telegram, which coincidentally immediately agreed to censor more) or threatened with arrest (Robert Reich’s call to lock up Elon Musk).

All of them are suddenly obsessed with the topic of misinformation, and using it to pursue political opponents or defenders of free speech.

All of them tell us that they are the Scooby Doo heroes who are going to protect us from malignant untruths. They are going to be binding those arms and ripping off those masks. They are ‘protecting Democracy’ and ‘preserving the rule of law’ by telling us what we see and are allowed to see.

All of them engage in this pathetic game of claiming to be the defenders of truth and the restorers of the natural order that makes sense (both politically and morally). Their fact checkers are the honest Velma, and their police are the square-jawed Fred. No doubt their actors and singers are the cowardly but entertaining Shaggy. They are the Scooby Doo gang solving the mysteries for us.

When we know, of course, the opposite. That they are the crooks beneath the mask, or perhaps worse, a near supernatural eruption of evil disturbing the world we thought we had.

We know that there are certain shared features of all the modern reactions to ‘misinformation’ and that the first of these is that the people using the term cannot themselves be trusted. When we look at the UK’s Online Harms Act, we don’t see Fred the volunteer policeman protecting us from extremists and child abusers online. We see that Chief Inspector Fred is a political appointee with an axe to grind who got promoted by repeatedly declaring how much he hates his own people. We are told to see the forces of law and order and decency protecting us all from hate and riot…but we already know that some hates are happily endorsed, and some riots too. So what we actually see is a Hard Left progressive government banging up its fiercest critics and chilling resistance and truth on topics like mass migration.

We see a regime trying to frighten us all into compliance and timid acceptance.

When we look at the EU’s Digital Services Act, the EU’s Code of Practice on Disinformation, the EU’s European Digital Media Observatory, we don’t think ‘thank goodness, here’s the Scooby van riding to the rescue to save us all from online groomers, terrorists and liars’, we think, we know, that here comes the tank of self-serving bureaucratic authority, ready to blow our basic rights to smithereens. And it’s the same with Australia’s Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) and Communications Legislation Amendment (Combating Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill.

All of these are legislative tanks aimed at free speech and legitimate criticism, as reeking of tyranny, in their way, as an actual tank on the streets would be. Indeed, Germany’s Network Enforcement Act (2017, amended 2021) rather let’s the cat out of the bag by brazenly including criticism of the established authorities as one of the things by which it defines misinformation. Others use their versions the same way, taking these ‘protections’ to cover ANY criticism of government, based on very broad and multi-purpose definitions of what misinformation is. Hate speech, which is also always invoked in these legislative measures to silence dissent, isn’t even really defined at all…it covers more any speech or text that the authorities hate, rather than any objectively proven to spread hate.

We know that because these tanks have mown down truth before. They have been aimed at true things, and silent in the face of what might be termed respectable lies. They did it on COVID. They did it on Brexit. They did it on the 2020 US election. They’ll do it on any upsurge of discontent, any flicker of genuine opposition, any hint of resistance to the ‘we know best’ absurdities and untruths that they believe in.

Who in America actually believes that Gavin Newsome is a fit arbiter of what truth is or what misinformation is? Who is dumb enough not to realize, yet, that it is opposition which gets defined as misinformation (regardless of truth) and compliance that gets defined and fact checked as ‘true’? Newsome of course has just made it illegal in California to post AI assisted election memes (AB2655). Does he really think people can’t tell the difference between a fact and AI assisted satire? Of course not. But he knows those memes will be a vehicle for opposition. They will, like any satire, share symbolic truths that aren’t welcomed by the powerful. And that’s why they are banned.

To defend ordinary people from lies, from ‘misinformation’? Of course not.

To defend Gavin and his friends from mockery? Of course.

The things that censorship legislation outlaws are only ever things (factual or satirical) embarrassing to the authoritarians who outlaw them. Their own lies, of course, are protected. They won’t be held to the legislation they pass, and nor will the ever-lying mainstream media. One of the shared characteristics of ‘misinformation’ legislation in the US, the EU, Germany, Australia and everywhere it is being passed is that ‘trusted’ and ‘reputable’ news sources (mainstream media) are specifically excluded from it.

They have a free pass to lie. You have to fear a knock on the door for a satirical meme.

It doesn’t take the Scooby Doo gang to work this one out. I’ve already seen memes that do it (no doubt newly illegal in California). Rip off the mask of ‘misinformation’-the misinformer isn’t you, or me.

It’s them.