A Lot of People Are Saying

by Nancy L. Rosenblum

  This connection is sometimes sustained by recognizing that conspiracism comes with the imprimatur of the foundational democratic demand for “eternal vigilance.” If government were in fact wholly trustworthy and every conspiracist claim were false, we could attribute all conspiracist thinking to paranoia or bad faith. But skepticism is always warranted, and some conspiracist claims are true. The trust that representatives cultivate enables them to assuage fears and convince citizens that a particular conspiracy claim is indeed false. Insofar as conspiracist stories are spread and adopted because of their source—because people identify with the person (now including the president) or social group pushing the narrative of secret agents and malignant intent—only another compelling source with which people identify can get attention. When representation works well, officials can fill that role.

  When it works, the partisan connection, which is the soul of political representation, goes in two directions. In one direction, representatives transmit and crystallize the interests, views, desires, and fears of voters and bring them into the formal institutions of government. In the other direction, representatives educate voters’ interests and address their fears.

  The partisan connection is not working well today. The new conspiracism, as we’ve noted, has a partisan penumbra that aligns it with the extreme right. As we said in chapter 4, we see an alignment between conservative ideology, which draws its energy from antigovernmentalism and anti-internationalism, on the one hand, and the rash of conspiracist claims about the “deep state” and betrayal of real Americans, on the other. The partisan penumbra means that Republican officials have a presumptive advantage in comparison to Democrats or nonpartisan civil servants in refuting conspiracist claims. Their corrections are more likely to elicit trust from conservatives and Republicans in the electorate. But what we see today are elected Republican officials who, instead of speaking truth, calculate that their own electoral survival and the success of their favored policies are better ensured by acquiescing to conspiracism. There is a virtually united front of elected officials, donors, and partisan activists. And so, representatives placate, avoid questions, refrain from comment, utter platitudes, and remain silent. Some affirm conspiracist claims themselves.

  Of course, obstacles to speaking out are strongest when conspiracist charges are leveled against the political opposition. Every Republican felt compelled to affirm, for instance, the allegation that Hillary Clinton conspired as secretary of state to cover up the details of the 2012 attack on the American mission in Benghazi, Libya, in which ambassador J. Christopher Stevens was killed. The partisan imperative to attack Clinton overwhelmed the need to both get at the facts and speak truth about them. This is undiluted partisan reticence. Representatives accommodated themselves to conspiracism’s malignant normality.

  Failure to speak truth to conspiracy changes the complexion of the partisan connection. Rooted in calculations of electoral survival and party loyalty, reticence raises the question in constituents’ minds, indeed in the public mind, whether party leaders and representatives mean what they say. When are they accommodating conspiracism in bad faith? When are they actively peddling stories they know are false? When are they pandering to and exploiting popular fears or donors’ threats? Can they be trusted when it comes to fundamental untruths that degrade democracy?

  Conspiracism brings us face to face with both the partisan connection and the limits of the hold that partisanship should have on democratically elected representatives. The character of representatives is revealed by how they respond to threats, and conspiracy claims present palpable tests of their moral mettle. They must be willing to point out that conspiracist claims are false even when these claims also function as an attack on the opposition party, just as they must hold their own party accountable for condescending to conspiracism. They must be willing to step out of the partisan penumbra, to loosen or cut the partisan connection, to say, as Senator Jeff Flake did, “We are not here simply to mark time. Sustained incumbency is certainly not the point of seeking office and there are times when we must risk our careers in favor of our principles. Now is such a time.”13

  Political Representatives: The First Line of Defense

  Speaking truth to conspiracy is a moral and political imperative, and it is a sign of dangerous times that so few responsible officeholders do. Consider Representative John Ratcliffe’s charge in January 2018: “We learned today about information that in the immediate aftermath of his election, there may have been a ‘secret society’ of folks within the Department of Justice and the FBI … working against [Donald Trump].” Ratcliffe continued, “I’m not saying that actually happened.”14 Two days later, after the ominous text message about a “secret society” was widely identified as a joke between two FBI employees rather than evidence of a plot, another Republican, Senator Ron Johnson, backed off and allowed that it might have been written in jest. But still he equivocated: “It’s a real possibility,” Johnson said.15 This falls short of disavowal of a conspiracy within the FBI, clearly, and falls shorter still of a sober defense of the agency or the Justice Department. And the conspiracist purpose has been achieved. Doubts are planted, and a share of the country will discount anything federal law enforcement says about FBI investigations, particularly as regards Trump. Such officeholders are contributing to the delegitimation of a crucial government institution and the rule of law.

  Some do have the integrity to speak truth. At a 2008 rally when John McCain was running against Barack Obama for the presidency, a questioner confessed to McCain that she felt she could not trust Obama because “he’s an Arab.” At the time, the birther conspiracy was dogging the Obama campaign. McCain, however—eliciting boos from his own supporters—refused to indulge the forces of delegitimation. “No, ma’am: no, ma’am,” McCain said. “He’s a decent family man, a citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues, and that’s what this campaign is all about. He’s not.”16

  Another example of speaking truth comes in the speech we mentioned earlier by Flake, when he condemned both Trump’s behavior and partisan reticence. “It is time for our complicity and our accommodation of the unacceptable to end,” Flake insisted. Invoking the first-person plural, “we,” he refers both to his fellow legislators in general and to his party: “Were the shoe on the other foot, we Republicans—would we Republicans meekly accept such behavior on display from dominant Democrats? Of course, we wouldn’t, and we would be wrong if we did.” He went on, “When we remain silent and fail to act … because we might make enemies, because we might alienate the base, because we might provoke a primary challenge, because ad infinitum, ad nauseam … we dishonor our principles and forsake our obligations.”17

  McCain’s action and Flake’s speech were widely noted and admired, but neither received public affirmation from other Republicans in Congress. Flake’s Senate speech was not followed by a raft of promises (not even just a few) vowing, “I will not be complicit or silent.”

  Can we expect this kind of principled opposition to conspiracism and allied pathologies of lying and vilification to get attention outside Washington, DC, and beyond its moment? Looking back, we may find that there was a right time, a moment of “opening,” when personal witnessing and a phalanx of speaking out really stanched conspiracism or its effects. Perhaps speeches like these, even if they didn’t motivate others to follow in the moment, nonetheless opened some minds.

  Speaking truth to conspiracy is not just for political representatives, of course. We rely on the press as well. Our capacity as citizens, and indeed the capacity of officials, to dispute conspiracist claims depends on arduous reporting and credible sources. Experts, too, both inside and outside government, whose authority derives from special knowledge, must speak out—as scientists do in the case of climate change when they educate, advocate, and mobilize, taking on the role of “witnessing professionals.”18 Civil society groups speak truth to conspiracy as a regular part of their work. Some d
efend the rights of groups that conspiracists scapegoat, such as migrants. Private citizens speak out personally and individually, too, in a host of informal settings where “a lot of people are saying” is critically assessed.

  Still, as a practical matter, political officials are the sine qua non when it comes to answering conspiracism. Courts protect against many violations of constitutional law and, of course, uphold due process in criminal proceedings. They are bulwarks against some of the cruelest and most arbitrary measures against migrants—separation of children from their parents, for example, by executive order. And these measures themselves come wrapped up in conspiracist claims. But judges do not “speak truth to conspiracy.” When political representatives have it both ways by passively acquiescing in conspiracist charges and avoiding straightforward refutation, no other institution can step in and do what they will not. When only a handful of Republicans break ranks with conspiracists in their party and with the conspiracist president, when they exhibit so-called loyalty and present “the image of a unified party,” when they fail to disrupt the exacerbated polarized political dynamics that are now epistemic as well as partisan, they implicitly accept these claims.19 They do not even try to build coalitions across the political spectrum to oppose conspiracism. They fail to do what they might in spite of the fact that conspiracism is infecting and distorting the business of their own institution, the United States Congress.

  Speaking truth to conspiracy underscores the discipline required of partisanship and political representation. We speak of discipline advisedly because, like all discipline, it is a felt experience, arduous and uncomfortable. Discipline requires officials to recognize threats to democratic legitimacy in absurd stories concocted from whole cloth. It requires the effort to recognize in the surface noise of democratic politics what is genuinely damaging.20 Speaking truth to conspiracism as both a moral matter and a political responsibility requires officials to risk retribution from their own party leadership. Some conspiracist charges require them to step outside the partisan penumbra even if it means loosening the partisan connection, and even if it means electoral defeat.

  Getting through to Open Minds

  Representatives must overcome reticence, refuse to acquiesce, and speak truth to conspiracy, but still there are impediments to stanching the dangerous claims that delegitimate democracy. With all conspiracism, classic and new, the counterstrategy of speaking truth runs up against the wall of closed minds. With classic conspiracism—the kind that collects evidence, that tries to connect all the dots, that offers theories and explanations—speaking truth to conspiracy is often ineffective. The conspiracist’s sealed mind-set is resistant to intervention. Conspiracists categorize contrary evidence as part of the conspiracy itself, and competing evidence is especially suspect when it comes from the very sources said to be part of the plan: political officials or government commissions or the mainstream press.

  These qualities of mind—epistemic closure, or a self-sealing resistance to all challenging facts—also make the new conspiracism difficult to correct and contest. It is all the more difficult in the case of the new conspiracism because so often the “evidence” consists only of bare assertion, “a lot of people are saying.” In addition, there’s the tribal element of the new conspiracism: identification with a group for which conspiracist stories are a regular way of viewing the political world. The tribal element imposes a real cost on changing one’s mind. Call it the reputational obstacle to acknowledging false belief.

  This consideration lies behind a proposal by law professors Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule for reaching “hard-core” holders of false beliefs: they suggest infiltrating conspiracist groups. “Planting doubts” and “introducing beneficial cognitive diversity” is their prescription for repairing conspiracists’ “crippled epistemology.” Government, on this view, should attempt to “debias or disable its purveyors” in this fashion.21 Their proposal for a government-sponsored conspiracy to combat conspiracy recalls the efforts by J. Edgar Hoover, the founding director of the FBI, who ran a counterintelligence program from 1956 to 1971 that, among other illegal and improper techniques, infiltrated civil rights groups.22 Infiltrating conspiracist groups is a similar offense against civil liberties—especially when the group is not a terrorist cell or some other violent association. Today, like-minded people who create and spread conspiracist ideas form networks transformed by the revolution in communications technology. They are not groups in the sense of face-to-face associations, in contrast to the Montana militia, for instance, but are networks digitally dispersed across the world. Anyone is free to participate in the online discussions. But were the government to infiltrate such discussions (and we now see that this has indeed been done, including by a hostile foreign government, using a variety of camouflages), the effort would sooner or later be exposed. The result would be to fertilize and presumptively justify the very conspiracism it intends to combat.

  The law professors propose to fight fire with fire: to conspire against conspiracy. But sometimes the best way to fight this fire is with water: to meet conspiracist charges with whatever truth we can command, pronounced openly and plainly. Correction emerges from a process of submitting propositions to the scrutiny of evidence dispassionately and meticulously collected. Yet this process—mimicked by classic conspiracism and repudiated by the new conspiracism—is unlikely to be effective for those who assent to fabulations. With respect to them, one can hardly exaggerate the depth of the authority deficit that afflicts anyone claiming to be in a position of knowledge. The delegitimation of knowledge-producing institutions has been effective. As one penitent conservative lamented, “The gatekeepers have lost all credibility in the minds of consumers, I don’t see how you reverse it.”23

  The problem is not only that gatekeepers have lost authority but also that the gatekeeping function itself has almost disappeared. As priestly epistemic authority over the word of God was displaced by the fifteenth-century invention of the movable-type printing press and the subsequent printing of the Bible in vernacular languages, so contemporary authorities have been sidelined by digital technology, which allows anyone to disseminate words and images at very little cost. When publication was very expensive, scholars, editors, and publishers exercised an unavoidable gatekeeping function: they decided what was worthy of dissemination. When the limited spectrum of public airways was the only way to broadcast voice and video, producers could decide what was worthy of being aired. Now there is no limit to the text and images that can be broadcast over Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and websites like Infowars. As the volume of what can be communicated approaches infinity and the cost approaches zero, the conventional gatekeeping function recedes.

  Apple, Google, Facebook, and other platforms have tiptoed into gatekeeping. In the summer of 2018 they removed conspiracist content produced by Alex Jones and his site Infowars. In justifying its decision, Facebook said that Jones violated its community standards by “glorifying violence” and “using dehumanizing language to describe people who are transgender, Muslim, and immigrants.”24 Facebook would not reveal how it categorized the violation, nor how many times Jones’s Facebook pages ran afoul of the community standards before the content was removed. In contrast to the traditional media like newspapers, Facebook’s editorial function is both opaque and diffident. It is as if the company wants to pretend that it can remain just a tool people use to connect, rather than acknowledging its status as the twenty-first-century equivalent of the newspaper and the network news broadcast. As a result of identifying itself only as a profit-maximizing corporation, rather than also as a public trust, the company has been slow to recognize its civic responsibility and the difficult decisions that entails.

  Still, it is possible that Facebook and companies like it will recreate some kind of gatekeeping function. Already, they are fitfully moving away from a passive posture of openness that permits anyone to post anything. Even now, Facebook employs “third-party fact checkers” who
assess the accuracy of articles in the News Feed.25 It is possible that fact checking will develop into a profession with its own internal standards, its own ethics, and its own professional modes of certification and testing. If the profession develops and is integrated into digital platforms like Facebook, the gatekeeping function could be refashioned.

  We may well be skeptical that any new epistemic authority could succeed when it comes to closed conspiracist minds. But meeting the political challenge does not require persuading everyone; it only requires reaching open minds. And the challenge here is not only the decline of gatekeeping but also the corollary problem of information overload. Given the staggering frequency and velocity of conspiracist charges, the burden of speaking truth is incessant, which itself may become fatiguing. It can wear out both those who are challenging conspiracism and ordinary citizens who have to keep up.

  The difficulty of capturing attention also owes to asymmetry: conspiracy without the theory deals in sound bites: “Rigged!” It is easy to state, spread, and swallow. It flows here and there through the capillaries of public culture. Refutation of faulty facts and examination of faulty claims are not “sexy”: “The debunk seldom travels as far as the conspiracy claim and, indeed, it can help keep the claim conspicuous.”26

  Scholars of misinformation have argued that refutation and denial may sometimes have the unintended effect of reinforcing the very conspiracist belief that is being discredited. As we noted in chapter 2, in the most vexing cases, actively rebutting conspiracist charges may have the effect of cementing them in people’s minds—this is called the “backfire effect.”27 On this view, erroneous understanding is amplified in the process of refutation. So it is not surprising to find some political observers arguing that the best strategy is to ignore conspiracism and its cousin falsehoods and lies, on grounds that, in practice, the act of rebuttal underscores conspiracist claims and gives them a degree of credibility.28 Yet recent studies show that corrections can be absorbed, or at least they may not have the perverse backfire effect of strengthening the views they are meant to refute.29 Fact checking can increase the reputational costs for political officials who disregard the accuracy of their statements.30 A reasonable conclusion is that to diagnose the threat that conspiracism poses, to unravel its logic, to falsify its specific claims, to call out the conspiracists, and to point to its destructive consequences are all necessary, though they are not guaranteed to disarm it.