hough the term was used long before he claims it was, there’s still some degree of truth to deHaven-Smith’s premise, according to Kathryn Olmsted. Public officials began adopting the term only “on a regular basis in the late ’60s in reference to the Kennedy assassination,” she said. “There might have been isolated incidents before then, but it wasn’t widespread.”
To this day, calling someone a conspiracy theorist remains a fast way to offend them and, as a journalist, confirm that you’re part of the biased lamestream sheeple media planning a hit job on ideas they hold dear. I used the term on Twitter. That was a bad idea in that it led to the bizarre experience of being attacked for the contents of this book well before most of it existed. “At least we’re trying to get to the truth,” wrote one guy, the proprietor of a series of minor-league conspiracy-oriented websites as well as a clothing line of conspiracy T-shirts, modeled by pantless women. He sent increasingly outraged messages on every social media platform known to humans, imploring me to look beyond whatever my handlers/backers/government masters had told me to find.
“If there is fundamentally underlying foundations of information that the public believes to be true, I do not expect you to understand the cult that you may be a part of,” he wrote, a little confusingly. “Science has turned into science fiction, history has been re-figured and you make fun of the people trying to heal. I believe in fair criticism, but find nearly only incredibly disingenuous hit pieces from the MSM sources you’re connected with. They wouldn’t run the pieces if you weren’t making fun of us, but I’m seriously interested how far you are willing to deny some of the things you have researched.”
This is a popular view: they will let me write about conspiracy theorists only if I make fun of them; the mainstream media and my handlers are all engaged in stigmatizing and discrediting people who get too close to the truth. People in the very deep end of the conspiracy pool have a Sisyphean view of themselves, perpetually rolling a boulder of truth up a hill, only to have the spiteful masses shove it back down again. One woman, named Raquel, a sixty-one-year-old Holocaust denier living in the Southwest, became a more-or-less friendly Twitter correspondent; she wanted to make sure I wasn’t writing about “stupid conspiracies” or dismissing evidence out of hand.
“There’s a lot of misinformation out there,” she told me, much of it government-produced. Raquel also had theories about September 11, JFK, and the killing of his brother Robert F. Kennedy, but her main thing was the Holocaust; she was polite even after I let her know that I am Jewish and believe quite firmly that it happened. Raquel was at pains to show that conspiracism doesn’t have to amount to pessimism or despair or inaction; she’d even come up with a scheme to save humanity. “My plan to save the world was to abolish money, law and the state boundaries,” she wrote. That didn’t work; she makes a living these days in a business connected to tax liens.
Conspiracy theorists prefer other descriptions, such as researchers, independent journalists, or seekers. A popular variant is members of the “truth community” or the “research community.” And the truth community in the United States is very, very large, a size that is reflected in the rich ecosystem of conspiracy-centric “alternative” news that attracts significant audiences. Conspiracy theories became a hot product even more directly marketable with the rise of talk radio and more recently with YouTube, which has become a haven for armies of would-be Alex Joneses, pushing every conceivable narrative angle possible in winding videos for audiences that sometimes reach into the millions.
Between talk radio and YouTube, e-fields of conspiracy-peddling websites and message boards have sprouted: Before It’s News, Godlike Productions, corners of Reddit, The Conservative Treehouse, and WorldNetDaily, one of the very oldest conspiracy outlets, that’s been able to keep a surprisingly loyal audience for a very long time. WND was founded twenty years ago by Joseph Farah, who wanted to make news from a “Judeo-Christian perspective.” He envisaged WND serving the same function as any other news service: “The idea for WND was to return to what had once been the ‘central role of a free press,’ serving as a watchdog on government and other powerful institutions,” Farah said.
In that watchdog role, WND spread stories about Obama’s foreign birth, FEMA camps, and any number of other questionable ideas. Farah argues, though, that he’s not the one making stuff up. “I deplore fake news,” he wrote to me, “which is a real phenomenon in what you would call ‘mainstream’ sources like CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post, as well as in the news media.” He didn’t consider that he himself promoted conspiracy theories—despite absolutely, definitively promoting conspiracy theories.
“Sometimes, they turn out to be right,” he insisted.
The problem isn’t that conspiracy theories are worse today than in the past, since they have more or less always been with us, waxing and waning in visibility through the decades. For their book, for instance, Uscinski and Parent analyzed a randomly selected 104,803 letters sent by readers to the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune between 1890 and 2010. They found evidence that conspiracy theories fluctuated in response to times of enormous social upheaval—the first spike was right around the year 1900, during a great acceleration of immigration, urbanization, and industrialization.
The issue, then, isn’t the conspiracy theories themselves, which any healthy societal discourse can absorb; we’ve done so for generations, treating them as a natural and understandable outgrowth of social upheaval and (very) spirited public discussion. The real problem is that an ever-more-efficient conspiracy-information machine has coincided with a very real resurgence in nationalism and white supremacy. We’re seeing unholy and shifting alliances of fellow travelers: conspiracy-oriented news sources, white supremacist groups, and so-called alt-right rising stars (generally, people who are willing to espouse nationalism and denounce political correctness but don’t like being called Nazis) are all feeding into one another. They share tactics, interview one another, signal-boost one another on social media, and create a cacophonous, self-reinforcing ecology.
The worst corner of this flourishing conspiracy culture amounts to a deeply regressive view of the world. It denounces immigrants as the advance army of some hidden globalist agenda. It calls Black Lives Matter activists liars and Soros-paid actors, while the victims of mass shootings and their grieving families are condemned as fakes. It confidently announces, as happened in July 2018, that liberals are planning to spring a “Second Civil War” on the country, attacking unsuspecting conservatives as they sleep. (The liberals apparently didn’t quite get it together in time to strike, and the much-vaunted war didn’t happen.)
And many of the biggest players are virulently sexist: Alex Jones denounced feminism as a globalist plot. Mike Cernovich, a juice-diet-peddling fitness blogger turned men’s rights activist who ultimately morphed into one of the bigger conspiracy peddlers in the country, wrote several blog posts on how to coerce unwilling women into sex. He has argued that “date rape doesn’t exist” and that men are the victims of a society-wide smear campaign: “Every man is under attack,” he once wrote. “Everyone from school teachers, preachers, and media figures tell men we are garbage. We are privileged. We are sinners. We are potential rapists. Resisting the brainwashing takes an act of will.”
The figure uniting these disparate groups—the white supremacists, the sexists, the die-hard nationalists—is Donald Trump. He legitimized certain conspiracy theories and theorists in a way that would have been unimaginable before the 2016 election, making “rigged elections” and the Deep State broad subjects of discussion. And nobody since Nixon has better embodied the concept of projection when it comes to conspiracy theories: the Trump campaign has, from the beginning, been dogged by allegations of a literal conspiracy with Russian governmental agents. Trump’s brand of wild accusations and a new enemy to target every week looks, in this light, like a very familiar image, a classic defensive dodge of long standing.
But conspiracism won’t die when the Trump era ends; it will persist and grow stronger, in large part because of our social stratification, our sense of disenfranchisement from the political system, our low trust in what we now derisively term the “mainstream media.” An April 2017 Harvard-Harris poll found that a full 65 percent of voters believe “there is a lot of fake news in the mainstream media,” including 80 percent of Republicans, 60 percent of Independents, and 53 percent of Democrats. Eighty-four percent of voters said it’s “hard to know what news to believe online.” The problem is not limited to the United States: A twenty-eight-country survey released in January 2018 found that twice as many people said they distrusted the media as trusted it, and many reported they were cutting back on news entirely. An erosion of faith in institutions, including media outlets, is global.
We’ve always been afraid of each other, fearful of the intentions of our neighbors, our government, our media. Some of us are especially prone to seeing ourselves as forces of good, fighting against whatever evil entities are trying to destroy society or religion. Conspiracy theorizing is part of the free exchange of ideas; suggestions that the government crack down on conspiracy thinking have been disastrous and inevitably given rise to new conspiracy theories.
And there’s something else resurgent in recent years: conspiracy thinking isn’t just for the politically disaffected, the powerless looking to make sense of their position on the social scale. We’re seeing conspiracy theories wielded by the strong against the weak, by those in power against those without any. At the same time, politicians now accuse their opponents of being conspiracy theorists, of trafficking in “hysterical” and baseless ideas, even as they deploy similar thinking when it suits them (as in the concept of the Deep State).
Elsewhere, some precincts of conspiracy culture have reached a new scale: monetized, commercialized, and weaponized. There are more and more “conspiracy entrepreneurs”—as Harvard researchers Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule have dubbed them—an army of people created by Twitter and Facebook and YouTube who make a living selling a heady blend of suspicion, hoaxes, and misinformation. Alex Jones and InfoWars is just the largest, most financially lucrative example, but there are thousands of others. They write blogs, teach seminars, promise quick-fix financial and legal packets, and sell nutritional supplements and other magical products meant to counteract the malicious effects of whatever “they” are doing to us.
Conspiracy theorists don’t just gather to dissect the moon landing or the JFK assassination. They are deeply enmeshed in global politics, as they have been periodically throughout world history, sometimes to our serious universal detriment. To focus on just one strain of conspiracism, the anti-Semitic kind, think of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, the caricature of Jews as world-controlling “global bankers,” or Holocaust denial: all are based on the ideas of Jews as secret manipulators of the levers of power.
There is evidence that some disinformation peddlers are influenced and fed information by governments that find them useful. The American alt-right participated enthusiastically in the dissemination of the Macron Leaks, a set of partly real, partly forged documents released to sway the French elections and put the nationalist anti-Semite Marine Le Pen in power. (Le Pen has long toyed with conspiracy ideas to sway her base. She’s declared that the “enemy of the French people” is “the world of finance,” echoing Jewish-banker stereotypes that still have a powerful hold in France.) The Macron Leaks failed to have any real impact on French voters: Le Pen was resoundingly defeated, but her party, the National Front, remains a legitimate force.
Around the same time, sites such as InfoWars and Before It’s News called chemical attacks in Syria into question, atrocities that were perpetrated by Bashar al-Assad’s regime and which killed thousands of civilians. Both sites suggested the White Helmets, a volunteer civilian emergency-search-and-rescue organization, had carried out the chemical attacks. Those allegations, which were repeated by the Assad regime and Russian-sponsored media, served one purpose: to create doubt or plausible deniability for the Syrian regime against charges of mass murder.
Global conspiratorial propaganda efforts also reached the United States: Russian intelligence agencies created pages for fake activist groups on Facebook and Tumblr, for example, designed to exploit and exacerbate tensions over police shootings of unarmed black citizens, gun control, and other hot-button issues.
Further, it became clear in 2017 that people serving in the Trump administration were feeding information to far-right news outlets. People such as once-marginal figure Mike Cernovich suddenly broke news that could have been acquired only via someone in the White House. The effect is twofold: a fringe figure becomes more credible, and, more fundamentally, uncertainty proliferates about what is true, who is trustworthy, who should be listened to. That uncertainty benefits the reigning power structure and serves to deepen distrust of all blogs, newspapers, and TV stations—the mainstream media the administration so vocally detests.
Our current conspiracy culture, then, is deeply entwined with the promotion of a radically right-wing and socially regressive worldview, one that elevates strongmen like Assad and Vladimir Putin to venerated positions and advances cherished conservative goals. Denying the death of mass shooting victims serves the gun lobby; denying Assad’s chemical warfare supports a set of geopolitical interests; denying that rape and assault exist, are common, and that victims should be believed strengthens a retrograde, sexist culture. In nearly every case, contemporary conspiracy theories aren’t random offshoots emerging spontaneously. They are politically useful.
The surge in the prominence of conspiracy sellers and the variety of wares they peddle shows they are a market that’s been quietly building itself on the edges of society for decades. It should be no surprise, in the end, that it ultimately broke into the mainstream. The result is a chaotic wonderland where every conspiracy idea, no matter how long dead, dormant, or ridiculous, has a chance to return and flourish. The past couple of years have seen a resurgence of discredited medical treatments—like using apricot pits to cure cancer, or bleach enemas to treat autism—and old hoaxes, such as, again, the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. At the same time, our trust in institutions and experts and authority figures—media, government, scientists—hovers at a historic low. No one can be trusted. Everything and every possibility is equally plausible. We no longer have a common set of facts on which to agree, not even the shape of the Earth. That amounts to a power vacuum, which creates an opportunity for someone—or many someones—to seize control and promote their own narratives and their own truths.