Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast
There’s a bizarre fallacy being pushed by the right-of-center commentariat and MAGA politicians, which is that the mainstream media, government, and other gatekeepers are innately untrustworthy—therefore even the worst purveyors of fact-bereft garbage are “valuable” to the public discourse, because they serve as a necessary check on “the powerful.”
The theory has even been used to laud the liar-for-profit Alex Jones as a brave dissident, a bulwark in the resistance against “the cathedral.” The anti-democracy, neoreactionary writer Curtis Yarvin credits himself for coining the phrase, which he defines as thus: “‘The cathedral’ is just a short way to say ‘journalism plus academia’—in other words, the intellectual institutions at the center of modern society, just as the Church was the intellectual institution at the center of medieval society.”
Put simply, adherents believe the cathedral is “the enemy of the people,” and anything the cathedral believes inherently discredits itself.