Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power

Prologue We've been a nation gripped by conspiracy for a long time.
  • Page 7 Sometimes, too, conspiracy theories are the "official story," the cause of real and far- reaching state action, as with the Red Scare, where a fear of Communists undermining the country led to life- ruining hearings and blacklists.
  • Page 8 There's a perpetual tug between conspiracy theorists and actual conspiracies, between things that are genuinely not believable and truths that are so outlandish they can be hard, at first, to believe.
  • Page 8 To understand why people believe things that are at odds with all provable truths is to understand how we form our views about the world and the resultant world we have made together.
  • Page 8 We're all prone to believing half- truths, forming connections where there are none to be found, finding importance in political and social events that may not have much significance at all.

    1. False Times

  • Page 14 [A conspiracy theory is ] 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.
  • Page 14 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. Note - Page 14 This definition undermines the idea of theory. Conspiracy fantasy would be better.
  • Page 15 Frank Donner wrote that conspiracism reveals a fundamental insecurity about who Americans want to be versus who we are.
  • Page 15 It is worth noting that conspiracy theories frequently echo the spirit of the religious zealots who founded this country.
  • Page 15 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.
  • Page 16 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.
  • Page 17 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.
  • Page 17 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. Time is forever just running out."
  • Page 18 The point is more often to identify an enemy than outline precisely what they've done.
  • Page 19 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.
  • Page 19 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.
  • Page 20 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.
  • Page 22 Antigovernment conspiracy theorists tend to overestimate the ability of bureaucrats to scheme in secret. Grand conspiracies are hard to conceal.
  • Page 22 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.
  • Page 22 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.
  • Page 24 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.
  • Page 24 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,
  • Page 25 we're not particularly receptive to information that makes us feel defensive or attacked about our existing values or beliefs.
  • Page 32 There is evidence that some disinformation peddlers are influenced and fed information by governments that find them useful.

    2. "None of It Is Crazy"

  • Page 40 There's often (though not always) some relationship in America between conspiracy theory and actual conspiracy, between the shadows on the cave wall and the shape of the thing itself.
  • Page 55 The existence of such fake sites confirms one distressing, permanent point: actual government conspiracies have generated a long afterlife. They linger in the collective memory, give rise to new conspiracy theories, and lay out a detailed, easy-to-follow playbook for fomenting further division and distrust.

    3. Nocturnal Ritual Pizza Party

  • Page 67 "coded rhetoric" meant to incite "scripted violence." 4. False Flags
  • Page 80 One of the most intense and immovable American fears is of subliminal, hidden government control. We're also worried about the other, more overt kind—armies marching down the street, doors kicked in, guns in our faces—
  • Page 81 the fear of invisible government manipulation is also largely accountable for the prevalence of theories of false flags: the idea that mass casualty events have been orchestrated or carried out by the government to consolidate its power.
  • Page 87 the first major school shooting, at Columbine High School, wasn't a popular false flag theory when it took place in 1999, before the age of YouTube, easily buildable blogs, and widely used social media platforms. Instead, that shooting was retroactively identified as a possible false flag years later by the truther community.
  • Page 97 school in a long time.""This category of recent conspiracy theorists is really a global network of village idiots," Pozner told me by phone. "They would have never been able to find each other before, but now it's this synergistic effect of the combination of all of them from all over the world.

    7. A Natural Man

  • Page 163 Although redemption theory targets desperate people, it also takes advantage of two facts: the tax code is impossibly, impenetrably hard to understand; and there is always someone, somewhere who has found a way to beat it. Anyone who knows that corporations and millionaires often end up paying very little in taxes is primed to find that argument persuasive.

    10. Conspiracism Is for Everyone: The Deep State and Russiagate

  • Page 222 Sometimes paranoia around the government and the White House turns out to be well founded:
  • Page 222 Despite much scoffing from the right, a persuasive case was made that the Russian government did meddle in the 2016 elections. The CIA, FBI, and NSA—not the most left-wing institutions, traditionally—jointly issued a report in January 2017 stating that Russian president Vladimir Putin ordered the meddling efforts to harm Hillary Clinton's presidential bid and undermine American democratic processes.
  • Page 225 Russian fever stemmed from a desperate liberal fantasy of a speedy Trump impeachment. "The dream fueling the Russia frenzy is that it will eventually create a dark enough cloud of suspicion around Trump that Congress will find the will and the grounds to impeach him."
  • Page 226 The concept is not new, either in the United States or abroad; in some countries it is a very real phenomenon—a permanent ruling class within the military, the judiciary, and intelligence agencies that remains in power no matter which party is elected.
  • Page 231 claiming that an external enemy threatens the sovereignty of the state—an enemy to be repelled by any means necessary—is historically a hallmark of authoritarian leaders.

    Epilogue

  • Page 243 But in the early years of the twenty-first century, people feel particularly dispossessed by a political process bound by two unresponsive parties, an ever-growing ocean of dark money, and representatives who become more inaccessible with each passing year.
  • Page 243 our lives are controlled by corporations and federal agencies they cannot see or appeal
  • Page 243 For some, inaction feels morally intolerable.
  • Page 244 we like conspiracies and seem to genuinely enjoy sharing them.
  • Page 244 "the proportion of misinformation was twice that of the content from experts and the candidates themselves.
  • Page 244 The word "polarizing" has a specific, and alarming, meaning, the authors noted. "This content uses divisive and inflammatory rhetoric and presents faulty reasoning or misleading information to manipulate the reader's understanding of public issues and feed conspiracy theories."
  • Page 244 Truth and fact-checking travel along the same paths that conspiracies do. But the truth is often complicated, shaded, and demanding, and there's no denying that it often lacks the powerful, emotional, gut-level appeal of a conspiracy.
  • Page 244 Beyond building an environment of misinformation and secrecy, conspiracy theories also have the worrisome effect of inducing paralysis, even as they galvanize those at the extreme end to extreme action.
  • Page 245 there is no shortage of people willing to profit from a population's distrust and disengagement, from the impulse to expose evil and the desire to right wrongs.
  • Page 245 people become the willing foot soldiers of a mob of fame-hungry provocateurs such as Mike Cernovich and Alex Jones, whose paranoid fantasies then ripple outward and touch us all.
  • Page 246 The popularity and durability of conspiracism means that it will always have its huckster street preachers such as Jones and Cernovich. But beyond the individuals, we need to look at the systems that made them so influential. Social media has created the world's most efficient vehicle of delivery for conspiracy theories. Combined with the hyperpolarized state of American politics and the resurgence of white supremacist and nationalist movements, social media provides a virtual assembly line for scapegoats, a systematized and lightning-fast way to spread blame, doubt, enmity, and politically expedient rumormongering.
  • Page 246 Ultimately, social media cannot be held directly responsible for the virulence of conspiracy theories. The same Internet that spreads garbage has also toppled regimes, created a megaphone for marginalized voices, exposed injustice, fomented discussion, and held power to account.
  • Page 247 Yet some proposals—like pressuring social media platforms to flag conspiracy theories as hate speech and remove the pages spreading them on those grounds—involve trusting companies like Facebook to distinguish between constitutionally protected speech and other kinds.
  • Page 247 Social media aside, it is our job to counter bad speech with better speech.
  • Page 248 Conspiracy theories can lose their draw if we turn to the work of improving the environment in which they grow by creating a more just, equitable, economically secure, and politically representative society. Conspiracism, like the xenophobia and suspicion that grow from the same gnarled roots, is fed by social instability.
  • Page 249 We will not be a less paranoid country until we are a fairer one. We need genuinely representative elections, better education in science and media literacy, a less moneyed system of democracy, true and permanent government transparency.