The Trumpian Untruths of Netflix

Though not as brash or divisive as the man himself, Netflix has nevertheless embraced a decidedly Trumpian sensibility. It has morphed beyond the pale of entertainment, transitioning into a curated hub of misinformation. With no premium placed on factuality, ethics or integrity, the platform has become a sanctuary for documentaries, of health and of history, that cling to a lie of credibility. It is at once a spectacle of irresponsibility and a transgression that can’t help but strike an ugly likeness with the pathological antics of America’s boorish ex-president.

During his time in office, one of the penchants that Trump established with abundant clarity was just how little regard he held for truth. So frequent were the falsehoods that gushed from the man’s mouth that they easily formed part of his personal vernacular. He was, and by all critical accounts still is, a Bullshitter. Not a liar – at least, not exclusively – but a Bullshitter. He is, as philosopher Harry Frankfurt submitted in his book On Bullshit:

“…neither on the side of the true or the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all.”

Such is the odious through line between Trump and Netflix – a shared indifference for the factuality of their content. Neither cares if what they say is true or false – neither are trying to deceive – both are merely concerned with espousing whatever will suit their political or corporate interests.

At the conclusion of Trump’s four-year term, The Washington Post tallied the man at 30,573 false or misleading claims. For the same length of time, Netflix has continued to air shows that are no less specious.

Unscrupulous coverage of debunked medical practices forms the unspoken premise for much of The Goop Lab series. Streaming since 2020, the six-part documentary delves into the enthusiasms of Gwyneth Paltrow and her lifestyle-cum-wellness brand, Goop.

Showcasing the miraculous effects of energy healing, episode five ventures into the theatrical with scenes of Goop employees moaning and contorting under the supposed influence of self-proclaimed ‘energy practitioner’ John Amaral.

“When I’m moving my hands in the air and I’m snapping my fingers and I’m making sounds with my hands, I’m putting energy into the field around someone’s body…The way we interact with someone without even touching them, at the subatomic level, changes them in some way, shape or form.”

Responding to the pageantry in a YouTube reaction video, Physics professor Philip Moriarty of the University of Birmingham proposes a far more likely explanation: “suggestion and the placebo effect.”

“If we could influence matter at the subatomic level by clicking our fingers, we wouldn’t have to spend billions on CERN [the largest particle physics laboratory in the world].”

“This is just nonsense.”

Episode six pushes the envelope of quackery even further with its foray into the paranormal. Headed by ‘psychic medium’ Laura Lynne Jackson and parapsychologist Julie Beischel, the final chapter is little more than a rehash of Crossing Over with John Edward. In it, Goop employees are once again made guinea pigs as Laura ‘channels’ their dearly departed, relaying sentiments and messages that are met with tears and artificial consolation.

“Being a medium means that I can connect with the consciousness of people who have left their physical bodies and crossed to the other side”, she explains.

To her credit, Laura resists the folly of characterising her mediumship as an ability bound up in the existence of ghosts and spirits – entities that are conveniently construed as lying beyond the metaphysical boundary of scientific investigation.

Instead, she couches her vocation in the exquisitely mysterious nature of consciousness. One of the most intensely debated phenomena in philosophy and science, of which there is hardly a consensus of definition, let alone an accepted explanation, and Laura sees fit to tell us, in no uncertain terms, “that consciousness exists outside of bodily death.”

It’s a claim that flies in the face of everything we’ve come to know about consciousness through the study of neuroscience, and worse yet, totally incompatible with the laws of physics.

Of course, all this is to say nothing of the reputation of Julie Beischel’s parapsychological area of expertise – denounced by mainstream psychologists as a baseless pseudoscience, failing to tender any semblance of convincing evidence in its 130-year history.

But for all the misinformation that The Goop Lab espouses, it is just one of several duplicitous shows that reify Netflix as a Trumpian Bullshit merchant.

Australian celebrity chef Pete Evans’ 2017 documentary The Magic Pill proudly endorses the ketogenic diet as a definitive treatment for asthma, autism, even cancer. Alas, the main claims of the film were quickly disputed by Dr Tony Bartone, then-president of the Australian Medical Association. Criticised as potentially harmful to the most “vulnerable and impressionable in our community”, Dr. Bartone even went as far to suggest that Netflix “shouldn’t screen it” because of the substantial “risk of misinformation.”

In the same year, the streaming service released What the Health, another documentary cut from the same cloth of problematic dietary advice. It’s a feature that is at pains to convince us of the “largest health secret of our time”: that meat and dairy are toxic, and all major diseases can be prevented and cured by adhering to an entirely plant-based diet. Suffice to say, were the film to have an objective synopsis, it would read precisely as Dr. Harriet Hall annotated in the wake of its release – “a blatant polemic for veganism, biased and misleading, and is not a reliable source of scientific information.”

But the most recent offender in Netflix’s catalogue of Bullshit stands as Ancient Apocalypse, the passion project of British writer Graham Hancock. In truth, it’s hard to imagine a more egregious piece of cinematic pablum than this eight-part marvel of misinformation.

Hancock treats the series as his viva voce (with added production value) – an opportunity to rival against what he views as the “extremely defensive, arrogant and patronizing attitude of mainstream academia” and submit his own precarious thesis of human prehistory.

For Hancock, the signs are clear: an advanced Ice Age civilisation was wiped out some 12,000 years ago, but not before sending out emissaries across the globe to imbue the rest of humanity with knowledge of architecture, mathematics, and agriculture.

It’s a theory which experts have unanimously deemed pseudoarchaeology.

“After more than a century of professional archaeological investigations, we find no archaeological evidence to support the existence of an “advanced, global Ice Age civilization” of the kind Hancock suggests…we call upon both Netflix and ITN Productions to remove any labels that state or imply that this series is a factual documentary or docuseries and reclassify this series as “science fiction.””

–An open letter from the Society for American Archaeology (SAA)

But unlike the other demonstrably pseudoscientific shows you can find on Netflix, the ills of Ancient Apocalypse aren’t just confined to its obvious falsehoods but extend to its repeated vilification of archaeologists as inflexible and conspiratorial.

Of course, there’s also something to be said about the theory itself and how, according to the SAA, it serves to rob Indigenous peoples of their cultural heritage and “spread false historical narratives that are overtly misogynistic, chauvinistic, racist, and anti-Semitic.”

Perhaps we ought to take Graham Hancock at his word when he says, “I don’t claim to be an archaeologist or a scientist.”

You would think that as the world’s most-subscribed video on demand streaming service that Netflix would fashion itself as a custodian of truth. God knows such responsibility deserves it. But no, factuality is thrown to the wind, exchanged for the insidious trappings of our social descent.

Despite Netflix’s ignorance, complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) – of the sort promoted by The Goop Lab – has long been regarded by medical professionals as a danger to the public health. Delays in effective treatment, harmful side effects, adverse drug interactions and a general distrust of conventional (evidence-based) medicine continue to underscore the CAM domain.

It’s no surprise Gwyneth Paltrow’s wellness brand has already been the subject of lawsuit over its unsubstantiated medical claims, infamous vaginal egg and all.

It’s fictions like these – like Goop, The Magic Pill and What the Health – that are every bit as harmful and every bit as Bullshit as, say, Trump’s baseless endorsement of the anti-malarial hydroxychloroquine in the early days of the pandemic. (An endorsement which, according to a recent study, carried an increased risk of mortality for anyone unfortunate enough to follow the advice.)

But it seems as though Netflix isn’t content to traffic in just one species of Bullshit. Rather, with the induction of Ancient Apocalypse to its back catalogue, the platform has proven that it bears no qualms about pushing the dial of societal degeneration, eroding public trust in our scientific institutions and even fanning the flames of conspiratorial belief.

It’s a familiar tale. Trump’s Bullshit has spawned all manner of conspiracy theory, from climate change denialism to vaccine-induced autism. But it was his fictive claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, and the grisly Capitol attack that ensued, that might be the man’s most malignant mistruth. By casting the nation’s political and governmental systems of checks and balances into disrepute, Donald J. Trump accomplished the unthinkable. He created an estranged reality where nearly one third of U.S. citizens – some 100 million people – honestly believed that Biden’s victory was the result of election fraud, with no evidence to show for it.

And yet, Netflix continues to engineer the same type of pernicious worldbuilding. It has joined the ranks of YouTube, tabloid journalism and the petulant ex-president himself in crafting siloed realities; a state of affairs where we are no longer united by a unified view of the world – of what is true and what is false, what is proven and what is disproven – but are instead fragmented into a mess of misinformed conceptions of reality.

One thing is true however: to the extent that Trump has become a cultural reference point for Bullshit, irresponsibility and a catalyst for social harm, Netflix appears quite content to follow in the man’s ignoble footsteps.