A Lot of People Are Saying

by Nancy L. Rosenblum

  Trump in fact presents himself as the arbiter of fact. He insisted that the official figure of deaths in Puerto Rico caused by Hurricane Maria in 2018 was wildly inflated, tweeting, “3000 people did not die … this was done by the Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible.” The correct number, he claimed, was in the range of “6 to 18.”3 The new conspiracism politicizes the process by which facts are produced and shrouds facts themselves in a conspiracist cloud.

  Delegitimation of authoritatively produced facts and conclusions has potentially dire consequences: the cumulative effect of long-standing attacks on vaccination and on policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions may be fatal. Elected officials who certainly know better go along, as Senator Rand Paul, a physician, did when, confronted with the conspiracist view that the measles vaccine causes autism—a claim contradicted emphatically by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Academy of Pediatrics—he equivocated. Responding to a question during a Republican debate in the fall of 2015 about the spurious vaccine-autism link, he answered, “I’m all for vaccines, but I’m also for freedom.”4 The senator understands herd immunity, which requires a high threshold of a community to be vaccinated, he knows that the vaccine-autism link is fraudulent, and he knows that there is no conspiracy to cover up the so-called link. His stand for “freedom” supports the freedom to ignore science and to refuse to comply with regulations protecting public health. The result is that physicians anticipate major outbreaks of preventable diseases. Conspiracism has the capacity to ignite a “disinformation pandemic.”5

  An iconic exchange from January 22, 2017, crystallizes the conspiracist assault on knowledge. On NBC’s Meet the Press, Chuck Todd asked presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway why the White House press secretary had repeated Donald Trump’s demonstrably false claim that the National Park Service had doctored photographs to diminish the size of the crowd at his inauguration. Conway said, “You’re saying it’s a falsehood.… And our press secretary gave alternative facts to that.” Todd responded, “Wait a minute, alternative facts? Alternative facts.… Look, alternative facts are not facts. They’re falsehoods.”6 The conspiracist response is not to try to validate the “alternative fact” but rather to reject facts and deny the authority of institutions that produce them.

  Rejecting Simple Facts: Obama’s Birth Certificate

  The birther conspiracy, which claims that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and was ineligible for the presidency under the requirements of the Constitution, is a prime example of rejection of simple, verifiable facts. The conspiracy was born in 2008, the work of a California dentist, Orly Taitz. Within a year it was afloat—an identifiable bit of malicious flotsam swirling amid the larger current of opposition to Obama. In 2011 Trump became what the New York Times called “a nonstop ‘birther.’ ” On Fox News, he implored the president to prove his native birth: “Why doesn’t he show his birth certificate?” On NBC, Trump said, “I’m starting to think that he was not born here,” and, “He grew up and nobody knew him.” Over and over again, Trump asserted that he had sent a team of investigators to Hawaii to unearth information: “They cannot believe what they are finding.”7 Trump amplified the allegation of foreignness by suggesting that Obama was a secret Muslim: “He cannot give a birth certificate.… He doesn’t have a birth certificate, or, if he does, there’s something on that certificate that is very bad for him.… Where it says ‘religion’ it might have ‘Muslim.’ ”8 (Birth certificates in the United States do not list religion.)

  Birtherism, like the new conspiracism generally, takes the form of sheer assertion. Its spread was assisted by the failure of many political leaders to speak truth to conspiracy. Plenty of officials remained silent; plenty of others chimed in. Senator Ted Cruz told supporters, “We need to send Barack Obama back to Chicago. I would like to send him back to Kenya.” In 2009 thirteen Republican members of Congress sponsored a bill requiring presidential candidates to include in official papers a copy of their birth certificates—pandering to those who insisted that Obama had failed to produce reliable documentation. A typical Republican response to the birther claim was support without responsibility: “I would love to know more. What I know is troubling enough.”9 In the same way, officials claimed ignorance when asked to provide evidence for Trump’s charge that former president Obama had tapped his phones by saying, “That’s above my pay grade.”10 When President Obama produced his long-form birth certificate proving that he was born in Honolulu, public belief in birtherism declined overall, polling shows, indicating acceptance of official record keeping. But no documentation could cause hard-core birthers to stop repeating, much less correct, the conspiratorial accusation.11

  It turns out that conspiracist claims are easy to create, and easy for officials to embellish, endorse, or just allow to play out. What lies behind complicity by insinuation, equivocation, or silence? As we detail in chapter 7, representatives are vulnerable to angry constituents who subscribe to conspiracy. When reelection is in jeopardy, or an official is haunted by the specter of a potential primary challenge, silence or coy encouragement seems a safer posture than correcting the record and offending one’s supporters.

  Without official equivocation, conspiracism could not spread from the periphery to the mainstream. Mainstream media are more likely to report on these claims when they come from a member of Congress, a governor, or the chairperson of the Republican Party. Silence on the part of leaders contributes to the confusion of citizens, who can think that when elected officials do not rebut birtherism, there must be “something there.” Equivocation gives the birther claim an aura of respectability as, at a minimum, a subject that warrants discussion. And it maddens and confounds officials and citizens who accept official evidence of Obama’s birthplace, who recognize birtherism as an attempt to delegitimize the first African American president, and who understand that the polarized partisan divide is now epistemic as well as political. Conspiracism creates a schism over what it means to know something.

  Most officials who stand aside in silence, or who, like Cruz, subtly encourage the conspiracy, are cynically, politically self-protective. They enable the conspiracy, but what really fuels it and keeps it burning are those of a different cast who themselves possess the conspiracist mind-set—like Trump. Obama released his birth certificate in 2008, and his long-form birth certificate in 2012. Even after that, Trump tweeted that “an extremely credible source” called him to tell him the long-form certificate was a fraud.12 Trump doubled down on the birther conspiracy in 2013, when the health director of Hawaii was killed in a plane accident: “How amazing, the State Health Director who verified copies of Obama’s ‘birth certificate’ died in plane crash today. All others lived.”13 It was only when he came under severe questioning in September 2016, after receiving the Republican presidential nomination, that Trump grudgingly conceded that Obama was born in the United States. Even then, he did something astonishing—he attributed the origin of the birther claim to Hillary Clinton.14 This impulsive add-on conspiracy reveals that the new conspiracism is not about making sense of a confusing world but rather about tribal identity and tribal enmity.

  Birtherism epitomizes intransigent denial of simple facts. Denial does not stop with unjustified rejection of the records of ordinary civil servants working in the Hawaii state government, however. Nor are simple facts the only thing at stake. Knowledge is less a repository of settled facts than it is a process by which we come to understand the world. This process has integrity when it is disciplined and unbiased—as scientists or professionals in the news media try to be. The new conspiracist assault is expansive, and it ultimately takes aim at knowledge-producing institutions wholesale. Consider the dangerous assault on the science of climate change.

  The Assault on Expert Knowledge: Climate Change

  The attack on climate science comes from two sources: self-interested corporations like Exxon, together with their partisan defenders in the Republican Party, and
new conspiracists peddling the notion that climate change is a hoax. The first takes the form of an intense but otherwise conventional political attack charging that climate scientists are biased. It claims that scientists have corrupted the integrity of their research because of their partisan leanings or precommitment to a set of conclusions about global warming and its regulatory solutions. The new conspiracists’ climate-change hoax attack is, by contrast, more fundamental and ultimately more corrosive because it is invulnerable to refutation and correction. When climate change is characterized as a hoax, the charge is not that climate scientists fail to respect the norms of scientific research or that they fail to submit their findings to peer review or that the science is ideologically biased. Climate conspiracists reject the whole of climate science findings with a bare assertion: “Hoax.” They disseminate it and repeat it until it makes a regular appearance in public life and becomes plausible, at least to some.

  The infamous unalloyed conspiracist claim is Senator James Inhofe’s: “With all the hysteria, all the fear, all the phony science, could it be that manmade global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people?”15 Trump calls it a “Chinese hoax” and serves it up with conspiratorial intent: “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make United States manufacturing non-competitive.”16 Conspiracist claims are ongoing: we are treated to the assertion that the idea of climate change is spread by environmental groups acting as foreign agents.17 The president’s account of the ruse now extends to a global conspiracy of scientists themselves, and he justifies his ongoing climate denial with “people are saying.” After Trump told CBS reporter Lesley Stahl, “They say that we had hurricanes that were far worse than what we just had with Michael,” Stahl pushed back, “Who says that? ‘They say?’ ” In response, Trump simply repeated his mantra: “People say. People say that …”18

  Oil companies and Republican officials who charge climate scientists with bias make arguments that can be refuted by showing that the science is not biased. Accusations of bad faith and bias, of distortion and misinformation, are an ugly politics to be sure; it is certainly not politics according to the deliberative ideal in which reasons are met with reasons in a common effort to justify public policy in the most convincing way. But it is a politics in which it is possible for intentional misinformation to be countered by better information. In contrast to the corporate misinformation campaign, the new conspiracist “hoax” deniers serve up not misinformation but fabulation.

  The corporate attack on climate science is tangled and secretive, so that ferreting out and exposing these machinations has been difficult. Nevertheless, the charge of corporate conspiracy has proved to be warranted. Exxon (which in 1998 merged with Mobil to form ExxonMobil) modeled its deception on the original strategy of the tobacco industry: a systematic effort of a small group of corporate-funded scientists to counter medical findings that smoking was a cause of cancer.19 Employing some of the same scientists, the fossil fuel industry funded so-called experts to cast doubt on global warming. Earlier, Exxon had itself done state-of-the-art climate research, but the company reversed itself in 1988 when legislative efforts to address climate change by regulating carbon emissions were gathering force. In an attempt to influence public opinion and to change the terms of the legislative debate, Exxon began to support denial groups and make demonstrably false claims: the company head stated in 1997, “The earth is cooler today than it was twenty years ago.”20

  ExxonMobil and its corporate cousins in the fossil fuel industry have concrete interests to defend: they fear “stranded assets”—oil and gas in the ground that would be unmarketable or less valuable if limits were imposed on fossil fuel production. In service to profitability, they have tried to shape public policy by distorting the public’s understanding of the threat posed by climate change. They are engaged in an intentional misinformation campaign. They understand the scientific consensus but are trying to obscure it. They do not have a compromised relation to reality; they are corrupt.

  And in their misinformation campaign, they claim the authority of science for themselves. Coteries of billionaires and conservative activists have created their own institutes, publishing outlets, and lobbying operations to demote what they represent as the liberal hegemony in research and policy. They do this by producing alternative facts. A 2013 study of climate-change denial publications shows that 83 percent of them have ties to conservative think tanks—the Cato Institute, the Heartland Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Hoover Institution, and others.21

  While the corporate misinformation campaign accepts the idea of expertise in principle—and even produces its own pseudoexperts to rival scientific experts—the new conspiracist climate-change denial represents a more complete rejection of expertise. The goal of climate-change hoaxers is not to persuade legislators and regulators; it is not programmatic. For those who claim climate change is a hoax, climate science is just one target in the sweeping attack on the authority of specialized knowledge. Expertise as such is disdained.

  So we now have a potent brew: the conspiracist mind-set broadcasting that climate change is a hoax aimed at weakening America, wrapped up with a cynical design by fossil fuel corporations and their political allies to undermine facts in order to protect their financial interests. The conspiracist deniers allow the corporate deniers to become more extreme and even more closed to the normal terms of political discussion and negotiation. Conspiracism pushes Republican officials into acquiescing in the idea of a climate-change hoax, even if they do not affirm it. Instead, they equivocate and resort to the mantra “I am not a scientist.” Flirtation with wholesale climate-change denial makes it easier for them to reject any policy to address global warming. It has allowed dark money to have a more extreme effect. As conservative political consultant Karl Rove said to oil executives in Dallas, “People call us a vast right-wing conspiracy, but we’re really a half-assed right-wing conspiracy. Now it’s time to get serious.”22 They did.

  Up until 2010, it was common for Republican candidates to run on a “green energy” platform, even to support cap-and-trade policies as a way to mitigate carbon emissions. But after the Supreme Court Citizens United decision liberated corporate money in political campaigns, things changed. Charles and David Koch, who own 84 percent of the oil refining company Koch Industries, poured money into a campaign to pressure Republicans into opposing any action on global warming. Their strategy worked: “Republicans who asserted support for climate change legislation or the seriousness of the climate threat saw their money dry up or faced a primary challenger.” By 2017, when Trump initiated US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change, every member of the elected Republican leadership united in praise of the drastic move.23

  Taken together, conspiracist hoax claims and the corporate misinformation and campaign funding strategy suppress the realities of climate change and distort public discussion in remarkable ways. For example, they have resulted in a gag rule that prevents the military from taking facts about climate change into account in its planning. A 2003 Pentagon report recognized rising sea levels and desertification as security threats, and a 2014 Department of Defense report “categorized climate conflict as a near term strategic challenge.” Yet 216 members of Congress supported an amendment blocking the military from considering the impact of climate change in its strategic planning.24 In another case, the word climate was eliminated from the mission statement of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.25 Across the board, offices and programs with responsibility for collecting and analyzing data are eliminated or starved of resources; the Trump administration Environmental Protection Agency announced its intention to defund satellites and ocean buoys that keep track of climate changes. As environmental activist Bill McKibben wrote, “We’re not just going to ignore the mounting evidence, we’re going to stop collecting it.”26 Government scientists and other professionals responsible for estimati
ng the risks of climate change are not the only ones whose work is obstructed and who face this malignant normality; on a vast swath of issues affecting public health and security, whole agencies are going dark.

  The nexus of assaults on climate science advances the incremental corrosion of specialized knowledge. It severely inhibits government from guarding against the global danger of the extinction of species and destruction of human habitats. Conspiracism may abet a particular set of corporate interests today, but arrant denigration of factuality, scientific research, and expertise degrades government decision-making. It is undermining not only one particular set of policies on one issue—climate change—but every policy and every program.

  Fake News

  We have seen how the new conspiracism rejects facts, as in the birther story, and how it denigrates expertise, as in the climate-change hoax conspiracy. Its assault extends further to denying standing to the institutions that produce knowledge—most notably, today, the free press. Everyone can see that Trump and other politicians attack the press. What is less appreciated is that this is an element in the broader new conspiracist phenomenon.

  Politics is frequently a scene of baseless and defamatory accusations and strategic lies, but as used today, the charge “fake news” is something new.27 It goes beyond the claim of a deliberate misinformation campaign, of misleading reports and malicious fakery.28 The charge is not simply a label applied to news coverage that is erroneous or deceptive or biased. Fake news is an accusation of conspiracy. It is meant to convey that the mainstream news media are secretly colluding to defeat Trump and to disempower his supporters.