Thus conspiracies have changed their form repeatedly over history, even in the relatively young history of the United States. A lot of conspiratorial hysterias in the early days of this country focused on what the historian Kathryn Olmsted in her book Real Enemies calls “alien subversion”: a fear that disaffected outside groups—Jews, Catholics, Freemasons, Mormons—were plotting to seize control for themselves. Sometimes, more rarely, the alien enemy was closer to home, as with the Salem witch trials, when a community turned on itself, neighbor accusing neighbor of serving the Devil in secret.
But as Olmsted points out, something significant changed in the twentieth century. Theories began to focus not on an outside, alien group seizing power, but on the existing power structure, the government itself; the Romans redirecting their attention back to Nero, as it were.
“No longer were conspiracy theorists chiefly concerned that alien forces were plotting to capture the federal government,” she writes. “Instead, they proposed that the federal government itself was the conspirator. They feared the subversive potential of the swelling, secretive bureaucracies of the proto-national security state.” As the government grew larger, particularly its military element, the number of conspiratorial ideas about it expanded proportionally. And some of those suspicions weren’t unfounded: the country has innumerable examples of actual government conspiracies, which became more outlandish and horrifying as we approached the present day.
In 1954, the CIA directly assisted in overthrowing Guatemala’s president, Colonel Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, in large part to protect the interests of the American-owned United Fruit Company. In 1973, the agency did the same in Chile, to destabilize and drive out of power Salvador Allende, the country’s democratically elected Socialist leader.
In the 1960s, the federal government engaged in systematic covert harassment of such activist groups as the Black Panthers and the American Indian Movement, and of Martin Luther King, Jr. and other members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, conspiring to ruin the lives of their leaders, set the membership against one another and against other activist groups with whom they might have formed ties, and drive them to despair, ruin, and suicide. The feds also engaged in long-term secret programs to test the effects of radiation on poor people, carrying out medical experiments that sickened and sometimes killed women, prisoners, and even children in state care.
Beginning in the 1970s and continuing through the 1990s, investigative journalism, along with declassified FBI and CIA files, revealed a series of appalling secret government programs. To pick just one: in MKUltra, the CIA and the army explored the use of mescaline and LSD by dosing unwitting civilians, including mental patients, prisoners, and johns visiting sex workers at covert CIA-run brothels. The records of that program were deliberately destroyed by the government in 1973.
But all those plots were, in the end, exposed, as were Watergate, the Iran-Contra scandal, and the NSA’s spying on Americans. Antigovernment conspiracy theorists tend to overestimate the ability of bureaucrats to scheme in secret. Grand conspiracies are hard to conceal. Yet it’s not unreasonable—at all, even a little bit—to believe that the government is still engaged in nefarious and secretive behavior, because we know that it has done so in the past. Timothy Melley, an English professor at Miami University, has written in recent years about the growth and alarming secrecy of the national security apparatus, which we glimpse through redacted FOIAs and anonymous whistleblowers, and reflect back onto ourselves in the form of TV shows like Homeland and House of Cards.
“Twenty-five years after the end of the cold war, the U.S. has 17 intelligence agencies employing hundreds of thousands of workers at a cost of some $70 billion per year,” Melley wrote in the New York Times in 2015. “But most of our ideas about U.S. intelligence work come from the endless stream of melodramatic entertainment in movies and on TV. The public thus finds itself in a strange state of half-knowledge about U.S. foreign affairs. When ‘top secrecy’ and ‘plausible deniability’ are widely accepted ideas, is it any surprise that so many people believe political power is wielded by powerful, invisible agents?”
We have found ourselves at a point in history where both real government conspiracies and their shadows loom large in our collective imagination. Those two things, working in tandem, destabilize the public perception of what’s true, what’s possible, and what we’re ready to pin on those running the country. But the problem goes beyond how civilians feel about the government; it also works, more alarmingly, in reverse. There are dozens of examples of feverish conspiracy thinking driving state action, where imaginary enemies and nonexistent plots have led to some extremely dark decisions. President Richard Nixon is our best worst example of this: he was, for one thing, a genuinely paranoid person who kept a long and well-organized enemies list and, in a double whammy of conspiracism, believed Communist-backed plots against him were orchestrated by Jews. That allowed him to justify his own conspiracies: tapping the phones at the DNC headquarters, the Watergate break-in, and bribing the burglary team themselves to stay quiet about their work.
During the Red Scare of the 1940s and 1950s, too, a fear of Communists infecting the country like termites in wood led to a shameful period of life-ruining witch hunts, hearings, and professional blacklists. (Richard Nixon, then a congressman, enthusiastically joined the House Un-American Activities Committee, which investigated suspected Communist sympathizers, to participate in the persecution.) Or, just a few years before, the incarceration of Japanese Americans in internment camps was based on nothing more than a racist suspicion that they were enemy agents organizing from within against the United States. When, beginning in the 1980s, right-wing extremists started to claim that the government planned to imprison political dissenters in camps run by FEMA, they used the Japanese internment as a reason why the theory was plausible.
More relevant to our own age is yet another phenomenon: politicians who willingly fan the flames of conspiracy either out of genuine belief or because it suits their political ends or some mixture of the two. Hillary Clinton blamed, with a straight face, a “vast right-wing conspiracy” for the women making sexual abuse claims against her husband, the president. The Bush administration infamously claimed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction to justify its invasion of the country. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz enthusiastically promoted the idea that Saddam Hussein, not Osama Bin Laden, was the hidden hand responsible for 9/11. And beginning around 2010, with the rise of the Tea Party, we saw dozens of state and local politicians claim that Muslims were taking over their towns with the canny use of Sharia law. Many of the same politicians, including Republican senator Ted Cruz and now–Texas governor Greg Abbott, also claimed repeatedly that the United Nations had developed plots called Agenda 21 and Jade Helm, designed to invade the United States and take our guns. Whether they believed such things to be true (they weren’t), the claims served as useful focal points for organizing their supporters.
With the arrival of Trump, politicians have also—in a twist reminiscent of Nixon conspiring against the imaginary enemies he feared—taken to generating what they themselves have scornfully termed “fake news.” The Trump administration launched its own weekly news service on social media in 2017, dedicated entirely to positive coverage of the president. The same year, the Associated Press discovered that the Republican Governors Association created what looked a whole lot like a website for a news outlet: it was called The Free Telegraph and it shared positive news about—you guessed it—Republican governors, alongside negative headlines about Democrats. Until the AP started asking questions, the site did not disclose who was behind it.
Even in the United States, which, as we have seen, is a perfect petri dish for conspiratorial thinking, not everybody buys into every theory equally. Fairly common beliefs—that Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t act alone in killing JFK, or that the government is hiding its knowledge of aliens—aren’t shared by everyone.
One persistent question is why some people go further into conspiracy thinking than others. There are clearly psychological, cultural, emotional, and circumstantial elements at work and, predictably, a mess of slightly conflicting studies to tell us how much weight to lend to each. There is some balance here of nature versus nurture: at least seven different studies between 2011 and the present have looked at the idea that people can be predisposed to conspiracy theorizing.
Some people might indeed have a stronger innate tendency toward conspiracy thinking. A 2016 paper, also coauthored by Joseph Uscinski, explains that predisposition seems increasingly likely to be a real phenomenon, a mixture of “political socialization” and psychological factors.
As with many things, we tend to believe in the conspiracy theories we want to believe, drawn to the ones that satisfy and reinforce our view of how the world works. Researchers have linked that to a concept called motivated reasoning: we tend to give more weight to studies, news articles, and any other form of information that confirms our pre-existing beliefs and values, and find ways to reject things that don’t line up with what we feel to be true, what talk show host Stephen Colbert memorably called “truthiness.” Studies on motivated reasoning from both the early 1990s and 2000s show the same patterns: we’re not particularly receptive to information that makes us feel defensive or attacked about our existing values or beliefs.
“When individuals engage in motivated reasoning,” two professors from Appalachian State University wrote in a 2012 study, “partisan goals trump accuracy goals.” They found that people would act as “biased information processors who will vigorously defend their prior values, identities, and attitudes at the expense of factual accuracy.”
Uscinski and Parent, the Florida academics, have studied another clear example of motivated reasoning: their research indicates that the conspiracies you believe in tend to line up with your political beliefs. (In a 2017 YouGov poll, years after the birther conspiracy theory should have been dead and firmly buried, 51 percent of Republicans said they thought former president Obama was born in Kenya. People who voted for Donald Trump were particularly likely to believe it: a full 57 percent of them said it was “definitely” or “probably” true. Just 14 percent of Democrats believed that racist, repeatedly debunked lie.)
The one thing Americans have in common, though, is our profound, widespread suspicion. In 2014, Uscinski and Parent published American Conspiracy Theories, which presents the results of years of research and makes a pretty persuasive case that nobody in this country is not a conspiracy theorist, at least to some degree.
“Conspiracy theories permeate all parts of American society,” they wrote, “and cut across gender, age, race, income, political affiliation, educational level, and occupational status.” Some beliefs crossed class and political lines: between 60 and 80 percent of people surveyed agreed that the Kennedy assassination was part of a conspiracy that was covered up by the government. Others, surprising ones, were closely tied to party: the conviction that climate change is a government hoax is more common on the right, while suspicions about GMOs are more common on the left.
Uscinski and Parent’s research revealed that people who believe in one conspiracy theory are likely to believe in others, a kind of domino effect of the mind. This isn’t a new result: a much smaller survey in 1994 showed a similar pattern. Ted Goertzel at Rutgers University surveyed 348 people in New Jersey, finding that most of them classified at least one of ten conspiracy theories as “probably” true. Fascinatingly, other studies show that people are able to believe in multiple conspiracy theories even when they’re logically contradictory: in my reporting, for example, I’ve seen people claim that both vaccines and a weed killer called Roundup are responsible for increased autism rates. (In an attempt to split the difference, some folks say that Roundup somehow made its way into the vaccines.)
Finally, a word about the term “conspiracy theory” itself. Taken on its own, the phrase doesn’t necessarily pronounce whether the theories themselves are true or false. But there’s no doubt that it has taken on a negative cast, evoking a frenzied paranoiac sitting in a basement before a wall of illegible, scribbled notes, his protective tinfoil hat firmly clamped onto his head. Some of that impression comes from Hofstadter, whose essay is incessantly cited and used, in my experience, to promote a mocking and unsympathetic view of people who buy into conspiratorial ideas.
If you were paranoid, you might think there is something at work in the use of the term “conspiracy theory.” Something sinister, perhaps? Most academics agree that the term came into academic use in the 1950s and entered the popular lexicon in the 1960s, although Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, published in 1945, uses it ten separate times. According to Robert Blaskiewicz of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, there are instances of the phrase being used as far back as 1870, and in 1890 and 1909 it appeared in popular periodicals, medical texts, and the Oxford English Dictionary.
But if you spend any time at all in this conspiracy world, you will hear that the term itself was created by the CIA to discredit people who get too close to the truth. The notion was promoted most prominently by Lance deHaven-Smith of Florida State University, who in a 2013 book proposed that the CIA came up with the phrase to undermine anyone who questioned the official story of the Kennedy assassination. It was part of what he called “a whisper campaign against critics of the Warren Commission,” whose investigation JFK truthers have found unsatisfactory and obfuscatory for decades. DeHaven-Smith and others point to a batch of Warren Commission documents released to the New York Times under a FOIA request in 1976. A CIA memo included in the documents showed that the agency was indeed concerned with alternate theories of the assassination, and with “countering and discrediting them,” it said, “so as to inhibit the circulation of such claims in other countries.”