It’s a typically disorienting winter day in an unremarkable part of Los Angeles, the palm trees bristling above the Walgreens and the tire shops, the golden light washing insistently over the slowly rotating sign above a twenty-four-hour burger joint, its paint peeled away into nonexistence. The sun doesn’t penetrate into this vast, windowless ballroom out by the airport, where I’m learning about the secret pedophiles who make up 30 percent of the federal government.
“Some of the top D.C. elites are about to be prosecuted for pedophilia,” David Wilcock promises. Wilcock is a popular filmmaker, researcher, and author in his forties, with shaggy blond hair fit for a boy band, a prominent forehead, and a matter-of-fact, deliberate way of talking about the moment all his dreams are on the breaking edge of coming true.
“We’ll get prosecutions,” he declares. “We’ll get war crimes tribunals.”
Much of the room, two hundred people or so, breaks into applause.
“They’re now working for us,” he adds a minute later. He means the government, or, anyway, its non-pedophile portion. “This is a very exciting time to be here. They’re singing like songbirds.” More applause and a few approving murmurs.
It’s the second day of the 2016 Conscious Life Expo, a yearly conference attended by some fifteen thousand people devoted to all things New Age, spiritually refreshing, energy-healing, chakra-balancing, and aura-fine-tuning. Leaving the lecture, I stop in front of two beautiful women standing behind a table heaped with different kinds of gemstones promising to cure everything from anemia to depression to gout. A guy with full-sleeve tattoos offers me Starfire Water, a mere $6 for a bottle and capable of curing PTSD, he promises.
“It’s just super, super intentional and positive,” he says, beaming. The smell of the delicious Indian food being ladled from steam trays in a corner permeates the air, hanging over the display booths. There are many capacious scarves for sale and a variety of tiny crystal pyramids.
Conscious Life is held in the sterile marbled halls of the Los Angeles Airport Hilton, a chilly white expanse that feels a lot like spending the weekend in a large, spotless, flower-decked restroom. Besides being a great place to purchase a geode, the conference is also, more quietly, a surprisingly bustling hub for conspiracy theories. Anti-vaccine folks and CIA-mind-control experts and even a flat earther or two wander its halls, trading some of the most ferociously out-there claims over samosas and cups of very good coffee laced with vegan coconut creamer. There is maybe no more welcoming place to think about conspiracy theories in America and their freshly prominent place in our politics.
On that balmy February day, Donald Trump has just been inaugurated and the runaway hot air balloon of his presidency is beginning to lift off the ground. Pizzagate, the conspiracy theory alleging that Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair is affiliated with a secret pedophile ring run out of a D.C. pizza parlor, is still burning up Twitter threads and message boards and leaking repeatedly into the mainstream press, where it’s disbelieved but still covered. The environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a famous vaccine “skeptic,” has announced that Trump asked him to chair a panel on vaccine safety. R.F.K., Jr. is pushing the debunked claim that mercury in vaccines causes autism, and he argues that the most prominent medical bodies in the nation are covering it all up, with help from a bought-off media.
It’s a surreal time. Conspiratorial beliefs that usually simmer below the mainstream for decades at a time are suddenly, insistently pushing to the surface. The news is full of white supremacist groups and their suspicions of a shadowy Zionist world government. The concept of a Deep State—a shadow regime, a secret body that’s really in charge—has become so pervasive that members of Congress are talking about it on national television, and its prominence hasn’t even begun to reach full force just yet. Even those flat earthers—one of the most fringe subcultures there is, besides those who believe the world is ruled by twelve-foot lizards—have seen a real uptick in their numbers. The term “fake news” is everywhere, and there are acrid debates about misinformation, partisan news sources, bias, and lies. People I’ve been covering for years as a journalist devoted to subcultures are on the front pages and in Politico headlines, achieving a hallucinatory new level of fame.
Even the most dedicated conspiracy theorists seem too stunned for words by their own sudden prominence. “It’s a whole new reality,” says Sean David Morton, my travel companion from the Conspira-Sea Cruise. He half chuckles. “The president of the United States has Alex Jones on speed dial! Alex Jones! I mean…” He trails off.
Along with his psychic skills, Morton is also a radio host on a program called Strange Universe, broadcasting daily from Southern California, which covers UFOs, get-rich-quick schemes, practical measures to achieve time travel, and conservative politics in pretty much equal measure. He has the booming, polished, confident cadence of radio stars everywhere, emanating from an incongruous body: he’s maybe five-foot-six, stout and sandy-haired, with a big D-shaped belly and a bristly little mustache. He’s forever in a navy blazer with what looks like a private-school crest on the pocket; he studs it with pins of Disney characters. TO SAVE TIME, ASSUME I KNOW EVERYTHING, his T-shirt reads. A string of beautiful women—thirteen, to be exact—stream by while we talk, kissing his cheek and stroking his shoulder delightedly.
Morton will tell you for many long minutes about the real power structure in these United States: that the government is controlled by the bankers and the British aristocracy and the Vatican. As he mingles with the Conscious Life attendees, Morton feels that all those entities are bearing down on him like never before. He and his wife, Melissa, are facing federal charges and a potential six hundred years in prison apiece for allegedly forging financial documents, a scheme that came directly out of their conspiratorial views about how the government and the financial system work.
If he’s convicted, Morton is on the verge of seeing his personal belief system collapse and, by extension, his life. Meanwhile, people like Alex Jones, people he jovially detests, for professional, competitive reasons, are rocketing into the mainstream.
But Morton’s worries aren’t echoed by most of the Conscious Life attendees. Stalking the Hilton’s halls, it’s impossible to ignore the fresh energy in the air and the excitement of people like David Wilcock, the filmmaker convinced it’s all on the verge of busting wide open: every secret government pedophile, every subtle plot, every dirty secret. Wilcock hosts a TV show on Gaia, a New Age video platform, with a cohost named Corey Goode, who claims to have served in a secret military space program for twenty years, fighting the bad kind of aliens. Later in the weekend, Goode will receive a standing ovation from an enraptured crowd for his galactic military service.
To build a boat sturdy enough to embark on this unsettling voyage, let’s pause to attempt to define a conspiracy theory. Splicing together a few different definitions offered by academics and historians, it’s a belief that a small group of people are working in secret against the common good, to create harm, to effect some negative change in society, to seize power for themselves, or to hide some deadly or consequential secret. An actual conspiracy is when a small group of people are working in secret against the common good, and anyone who tells you we can always easily distinguish fictitious plots from real ones probably hasn’t read much history.
The historian Frank P. Mintz coined the term “conspiracism,” which he defined as a “belief in the primacy of conspiracies in the unfolding of history.” Conspiracism works for everyone, in Mintz’s view; it “serves the needs of diverse political and social groups in America and elsewhere. It identifies elites, blames them for economic and social catastrophes, and assumes that things will be better once popular action can remove them from positions of power.” It is, in essence, a view of how we can vanquish the Devil and achieve Heaven right here on earth.
And conspiracism has been inextricably woven into the American experience from the beginning. As Jesse Walker writes in his book The United States of Paranoia, even before the colonists were fretting about the plots of secret super-Indians, the founding fathers accused England of plotting against them, trying to force the colonies into servitude or outright enslavement, what George Washington called “a regular Systematick Plan” to turn them into “tame, & abject Slaves, as the Blacks we Rule over with such arbitrary Sway.” The Declaration of Independence lists the indignities and outrages England perpetrated against the colonies, but it doesn’t stop there: it argues that those acts total up to a plot, what it calls “a design,” to bring the colonies under “absolute Despotism.”
Conspiracy theories tend to flourish especially at times of rapid social change, when we’re reevaluating ourselves and, perhaps, facing uncomfortable questions in the process. In 1980, the civil liberties lawyer and author Frank Donner wrote that conspiracism reveals a fundamental insecurity about who Americans want to be versus who we are.
“Especially in times of stress, exaggerated febrile explanations of unwelcome reality come to the surface of American life and attract support,” he wrote. The continual resurgence of conspiracy movements, he claimed, “illuminates a striking contrast between our claims to superiority, indeed our mission as a redeemer nation to bring a new world order, and the extraordinary fragility of our confidence in our institutions.” That contrast, he said, “has led some observers to conclude that we are, subconsciously, quite insecure about the value and permanence of our society.”
It is worth noting that conspiracy theories frequently echo the spirit of the religious zealots who founded this country. Julie Ingersoll, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Florida, writes that such theories frame world events in monolithic, black-and-white terms: “Conspiracy theories seek to explain events not merely in terms of human actors but in terms of all-inclusive mythic narratives or worldviews, rooted in a fundamental division between Good and Evil.”
Like religion, conspiracy theories don’t just identify a common enemy, but outline a path to a better life and provide hope for the future. Numerous studies have noted that insecure and threatened populations—nonwhite people and unemployed people among them—show higher rates of conspiracy thinking. Joseph DiGrazia, then an assistant professor at York University, wrote in 2017 that “macro-level social conditions and structural social changes,” like economic instability, could create “feelings of threat and insecurity,” which, in turn, lead to higher levels of what he called “conspiratorial ideation.”
Feelings of “threat and insecurity” are normal features of American life for plenty of people, and Joseph Uscinski and Joseph Parent, political scientists, argue that conspiracy thinking is like normal political thinking, but more so. “Where regular politicians highlight problems, advocate solutions and call for concerted action soon,” they write, “conspiracy theorists highlight an abysmal state of affairs, advocate titanic policies, and call for concerted action right now.” (And even on its best day, politics-as-usual frequently involves a sort of conspiracy-lite, with plots, alliances, hidden motives, and spin.)
Thus conspiracy theories, in the more sophisticated academic readings, look like a way to give corporeal form to hard-to-define anxieties, a foe on which to pin the varied worries and misfortunes of a group that senses marginalization, like conservatives during the 1960s and again in the Obama years, when they sensed power and cultural influence slipping from their grasp.
That sense of fragility and distrust are particularly noticeable again in the mid-2000s: huge swaths of people feel locked out of the political process, not even bothering to vote out of a belief that it won’t make much of a difference. We have a stunning and increased lack of social mobility, a profound distrust of “elites” and those in power, as well as a persistent fear of “outsiders” and “others” taking what we see as limited resources. Combined with deep inequalities of race and class, all that makes for an environment that’s conspiracy-saturated in a way that’s unusual outside of repressive countries with authoritarian regimes and state-run media.
Conspiracy theories are, for example, wildly popular in the Middle East, many of them anti-Semitic or anti-Israel, holding either Jews or Israelis responsible for events at home (the most bizarre was in 2010, when an Egyptian government official claimed that a series of shark attacks at a Red Sea resort were directed by Israel, that the sharks themselves were “sent by Mossad”) or events abroad (9/11, the assassination of U.S. presidents). In Israel, there are many competing conspiracy theories on the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin; they originate from the left and right alike, and focus on disbelief that a lone Jewish law student was responsible for the murder. Sometimes they originate from the state itself, as in Russia, where disinformation and elaborate conspiratorial explanations emanate constantly from both the government and respected public intellectuals. Russian conspiracies are as numerous as dandelions on a spring day, and a lot of them center on the United States; the so-called Dulles Plan holds that the CIA plotted to bring down the Soviet Union by promoting vice and sin through art and literature, among other things. The Hungarian government has a single-minded obsession with Hungarian-born liberal billionaire George Soros, who lives in the United States, accusing him of plotting to smuggle refugees into Europe. (The number of things pinned on Soros both at home and abroad could fill several books.)
The most famous writing on conspiratorial thinking in the United States is Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” a long essay that first ran in Harper’s in November 1964, which posits conspiracism as a type of mental illness infecting a swath of Americans, particularly those on the far right. Hofstadter wasn’t exactly engaged in diagnosis (“I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes,” he wrote). At the same time, he bluntly pointed to a kind of feverish paranoia sweeping over political actors, wildly distorting their judgment, leading them to see hidden enemies everywhere, and convincing them that drastic action was not just necessary, but urgently justified.
As his examples, Hofstadter pointed to McCarthyism, anti-Masonic fervor, and fear of the Illuminati, which had been haunting the colonies since the 1700s. (The Illuminati were a real if short-lived secret society founded in Bavaria by one Adam Weishaupt, who liked the idea of a secret society but found the Freemasons too expensive. His organization’s name, and their outsized reputation, long outlived the Bavarian Illuminati, which fell apart within a decade.) In the 1960s, Hofstadter saw paranoia as a pernicious and growing influence in American life, citing the rise of groups like the anticommunist John Birch Society. He laid out a blueprint for the paranoid style that, even after all these years, sounds familiar to anyone who ever watched Glenn Beck sweat onto his chalkboard.
“The central image is that of a vast and sinister conspiracy,” Hofstadter wrote of the paranoid’s view of the world, “a gigantic and yet subtle machinery of influence set in motion to undermine and destroy a way of life.” He allowed that there were indeed actual conspiracies in American and world history, but the paranoid saw conspiracies as gigantic, apocryphal, world-ending: “The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point; it is now or never in organizing resistance to conspiracy. Time is forever just running out.”
It’s easy to say that conspiracy theories present oversimplified narratives, that they’re less messy than reality. Hofstadter claimed that “the paranoid mentality is far more coherent than the real world, since it leaves no room for mistakes, failures, or ambiguities.” But that’s not entirely true: very often, in practice, conspiracy theories don’t seek to forge a single coherent narrative and are content to leave much ambiguity, creating chaotic narrative threads that don’t quite add up or make sense. The point is more often to identify an enemy than outline precisely what they’ve done.
“The modern right wing,” Hofstadter suggested, felt uniquely dispossessed: “America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans.” He was making that point as a coalition of movements—civil rights, second-wave feminism, anti–Vietnam War activism—aimed to fundamentally reshape American life. And his ideas about far-right discontent came before the conservative backlash of the 1970s, when aggrieved right-wingers began to mobilize and articulate a vision of social and familial “traditionalism” that became central to the Republican Party’s vision of itself.
Hofstadter’s analysis—that paranoia is an infection in the bloodstream of the body politic and an irrational way of experiencing world events—has been complicated in recent years by more culturally and socially sophisticated readings of conspiracy theorism. University of Florida professor Mark Fenster points out that conspiracy theories are often an exaggerated expression of American populism: our suspicion of authority figures, our fear of consolidation of power. Echoing that, journalist David Aaronovitch notes that a conspiracy theory is likely to be “politically populist, in that it usually claims to lay bare an action taken by a small power elite against the people.”
It is true that while conspiracy theories are equally common in rural and urban areas of the United States, there’s a distinct class element to them: people with only a high school education are more likely to believe at least one, and people who report a higher income are less likely to declare conspiratorial beliefs. The “elites” threatening the people tend to be the same foe by different names: Alex Jones uses the term “globalists” as a catch-all for a vague and threatening global power elite, while others use terms like “New World Order.” Sometimes the enemy is the U.S. government, sometimes it’s the Jews, and sometimes—more rarely than I personally would like—the queen of England, believed by a sadly dwindling number of people to be the head of a brutal global drug cartel.
In the dark of the night of July 19, AD 64, a fire broke out in the slums of Rome and, swept along by vicious winds, devastated the town, leveling several districts entirely. The fire burned for six days, died down, was reignited, and burned for three more. Hundreds of people were killed; many more were left destitute and homeless.
In the midst of it all, the famously conniving Emperor Nero—who was away in his holiday home on a cool hillside when the fires began—was reported by the historian Tacitus to have placidly watched the city burn as he nonchalantly played his fiddle or plucked his lyre. (Tacitus was writing years later; he was a teenager when Nero died, and historians have argued since that we know little about his sources or biases.)
Per Tacitus, Roman citizens began to suspect that Nero himself had ordered the fires set, to consolidate his power and reconstruct Rome in the manner he saw fit. Or he had allowed the fires to keep burning for the same reason, even sending mobs to prevent citizens from quashing the flames. Nero, meanwhile, blamed the fires on an upstart religious group, the Christians, and used the pretext to merrily persecute and crucify them. Many parts of the story have been called into question by modern scholarship, but the Nero-fiddling-as-Rome-burns version is one of the earliest known examples of two things. First, it’s a conspiracy theory about the government unleashing chaos to extend control; second, a government official used a conspiracy theory to realize political ends.
All these many centuries later, conspiracy theories relating to September 11 echo the Roman fire incident: that the Bush administration either passively allowed the attacks to happen or orchestrated them for political ends. (The two branches of 9/11 conspiracism have become so entrenched that they have their own acronyms: LIHOP, for “let it happen on purpose,” and MIHOP, “made it happen on purpose.”)
The Rome fire myth also illustrates something else: people historically developed conspiracy theories about local phenomena, things that happened right in front of them. As our world has gotten larger and more connected, we tend to theorize about distant people, places, and events. Our theories are so broad they encompass the galaxy itself and the most distant reaches of space: UFO conspiracism has been a beloved American pastime for nearly a century.
The local element hasn’t disappeared, though; indeed, our communications have made conspiracism more intimate than ever. Social media allows us to fasten a conspiracy on a seemingly random or inconsequential person: the victim of a school shooting, say, or the owner of a pizza parlor. Self-appointed online detectives can use digital tools to contact, expose, harass, and occasionally terrorize the alleged plotters in ways that would have been impossible even twenty years ago.