A Lot of People Are Saying

by Nancy L. Rosenblum

15. Jonathan Mahler, “What Do We Really Know about Osama Bin Laden’s Death?,” New York Times, October 15, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/magazine/what-do-we-really-know-about-osama-bin-ladens-death.html.

  16. Steven M. Smallpage, Adam M. Enders, and Joseph E. Uscinski, “The Partisan Contours of Conspiracy Theory Beliefs,” Research and Politics 4, no. 4 (October 2017), online version published December 11, 2017, https://doi.org/10.1177/2053168017746554.

  17. Runciman, How Democracy Ends, 64.

  18. For the full text of the indictment, see “Text: Full Mueller Indictment on Russian Election Case,” Politico, February 16, 2018, https://www.politico.com/story/2018/02/16/text-full-mueller-indictment-on-russian-election-case-415670.

  19. Rebecca Morin, “Bolton: Russian Hacks Could Actually Have Been by Obama Administration,” Politico, December 11, 2016, https://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/john-bolton-russia-hack-a-false-flag-232490.

  20. Samantha Schmidt, “A Coup in America? Fox News Escalates Anti-Mueller Rhetoric,” Washington Post, December 18, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/12/18/a-coup-in-america-fox-news-escalates-anti-mueller-rhetoric.

  21. David Runciman addressed this question and the relation to skepticism in his lecture “Are Conspiracy Theories Bad for Democracy?” (London School of Economics, February 10, 2016), http://www.lse.ac.uk/Events/2016/02/20160210t1830vHKT/Are-Conspiracy-Theories-Bad-for-Democracy.

  22. For example, the rumor that, as a result of the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy and the forcible separation of migrant children from their families, the government had “lost” 1,500 children. The data were from 2014 under different circumstances; though the claim was repeated widely, it was quickly corrected and those who had repeated it, like Senator Ed Markey, Democrat from Massachusetts, retracted the charge. A. J. Willingham, “Here’s What’s Really Happening with the 1,500 ‘Missing’ Immigrant Children,” CNN, last updated May 29, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/29/us/immigration-refugee-child-missing-hhs-obama-photo-trnd/index.html; McKay Coppins, “How the Left Lost Its Mind,” Atlantic, July 2, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/liberal-fever-swamps/530736/.

  23. Pierre Rosanvallon, Good Government: Democracy beyond Elections, trans. Malcolm DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 146–71.

  24. Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in The Vocation Lectures (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004).

  25. In related studies, political scientists discuss threats to democracy. For example, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt identify four warning signs of the turn to authoritarianism: the leader shows only a weak commitment to democratic rules, denies the legitimacy of opponents, tolerates or encourages violence, and shows some willingness to curb civil liberties or the media; Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Crown, 2018), 23–24.

  Chapter 1. Conspiracy without the Theory

  1. Martin Parker, “Human Science as Conspiracy Theory,” Sociological Review 48, no. 2 (October 2000): 191–207, 202.

  2. Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth website, accessed September 13, 2018, https://www.ae911truth.org/.

  3. For a thorough analysis of 9/11 conspiracy theories, see Charles B. Strozier, “Historical Perspectives on the 9/11 Conspiracy Movement,” 2010 (unpublished essay on file with the authors). Also see the Complete 911 Timeline Investigative Project hosted by History Commons, accessed September 13, 2018, http://www.historycommons.org/project.jsp?project=911_project.

  4. Brian L. Keeley, “Of Conspiracy Theories,” Journal of Philosophy 96, no. 3 (March 1999): 109–26, 117.

  5. History belies the “all men,” of course, and there is an enormous literature on which of the founders thought what about African and Native Americans, women, and many classes of Caucasian European men.

  6. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 95.

  7. Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 94–95.

  8. Gordon Wood, “Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly 39, no. 3 (July 1982): 401–41, 421. Wood documents the change from a framework that understands causality in terms of individual moral agency with an emphasis on intentions to one that emphasizes general social processes, such as the market’s “invisible hand” and unintended consequences. Because conspiracy theories reflect the earlier notion of causality, they are often dubbed irrational, not quite normal, and “paranoid.”

  9. David Brion Davis, Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-American Subversion from the Revolution to the Present (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 24–25.

  10. Alexander Hamilton, The Farmer Refuted, quoted in Eric Nelson, “What Kind of Book Is The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution?,” New England Quarterly 90, no. 1 (March 2018): 147–71, 167.

  11. Nelson, 158.

  12. Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 95.

  13. Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Vintage, 1998).

  14. Sonam Sheth, “NPR Tweeted Out the Declaration of Independence on July 4—and Twitter Went Nuts,” Business Insider, June 5, 2017, http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-supporters-react-to-npr-declaration-of-independence-tweets-2017-7.

  15. Davis, Fear of Conspiracy, 23.

  16. Brian L. Keeley, “On Conspiracy Theories,” Journal of Philosophy 96, no. 3 (March 1999): 109–26, 116.

  17. Keeley, 116.

  18. Isaac Stanley-Becker, “ ‘We Are Q’: A Deranged Conspiracy Cult Leaps from the Internet to the Crowd at Trump’s ‘MAGA’ Tour,” Washington Post, August 1, 2018, http://www.washingtopost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/08; Paris Martineau, “The Storm Is the New Pizzagate—Only Worse,” New York, December 19, 2017, http://nymag.com/selectall/2017/12/qanon-4chan-the-storm-conspiracy-explained.html.

  19. Lena H. Sun and Sari Horwitz, “Conspiracy Theories Swirl around the Death of Antonin Scalia,” Washington Post, February 15, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/02/15/conspiracy-theories-swirl-around-the-death-of-antonin-scalia/?utm_term=.5a656535f0c2.

  20. Rob Brotherton, Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories (London: Bloomsbury Sigma, 2015), 78.

  21. Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman, “Trump Aides Address His Wiretap Claims: ‘That’s above My Pay Grade,’ ” New York Times, March 7, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/07/us/politics/trump-wiretap-claim-obama.html.

  22. Bryan Clark, “Rep Shares Article Saying Charlottesville Was ‘Set-Up,’ ” Idaho Post Register, August 18, 2017, http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2017/aug/18/idaho-state-rep-shares-article-saying-charlottesvi/.

  23. Delegitimation is also what Steve Bannon, no standard Republican, went after openly and ferociously when he advocated “deconstruction of the administrative state.” Philip Rucker and Robert Costa, “Bannon Vows a Daily Fight for ‘Deconstruction of the Administrative State,’ ” Washington Post, February 23, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/top-wh-strategist-vows-a-daily-fight-for-deconstruction-of-the-administrative-state/2017/02/23/03f6b8da-f9ea-11e6-bf01-d47f8cf9b643_story.html?utm_term=.f07737a77bb0.

  24. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in America Politics and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 29.

  25. Nelson, “What Kind of Book?,” 163.

  26. Ivan Krastev, “The Rise of the Paranoid Citizen,” New York Times, March 16, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/16/opinion/the-rise-of-the-paranoid-citizen.html.

  27. Jay Ogilvy, “The Apocalyptic Vision of Stephen K. Bannon,” Forbes, August 17, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stratfor/2017/08/17/the-apocalyptic-vision-of-stephen-k-bannon/.

  28. Faiz Siddiqui and Susan Svrluga, “N.C. Man Told Police He Went to D.C. Pizzeria with Gun to Investigate Conspiracy Theory,” Washington Post, December 5, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2016/12/04/d-c-police
-respond-to-report-of-a-man-with-a-gun-at-comet-ping-pong-restaurant/?utm_term=.0ffba0f83aec. On Russian contributions to the Pizzagate narrative, see Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2018), 246.

  29. Krastev, “Rise of the Paranoid Citizen.”

  30. “Transcript: ABC News Anchor David Muir Interviews President Trump,” ABC News, January 25, 2017, http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/transcript-abc-news-anchor-david-muir-interviews-president/story?id=45047602.

  31. Snyder, Road to Unfreedom, 229.

  32. Jonathan Albright, an assistant professor of media analytics at Elon University in North Carolina, quoted in “Belleville Woman Helped Cook Up Pizzagate,” Star (Toronto), December 7, 2016, https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2016/12/07/belleville-woman-helped-cook-up-pizzagate.html. When these bots were part of the Russian campaign to influence the presidential election, ordinary people who spread them become unwitting accomplices in a foreign hacking operation; see Snyder, Road to Unfreedom, 228–231.

  33. Karen S. Cook, Margaret Levi, and Russell Hardin, Whom Can We Trust: How Groups, Networks, and Institutions Make Trust Possible (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2009), 1.

  34. Abigail Tracy, “Republicans Say Firing Mueller Is the Only Way to Prevent a ‘Coup,’ ” Vanity Fair, November 9, 2017, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/11/republicans-robert-mueller-russia-investigation.

  35. Samantha Schmidt, “A ‘Coup in America’? Fox News Escalates Anti-Mueller Rhetoric,” Washington Post, December 18, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/12/18/a-coup-in-america-fox-news-escalates-anti-mueller-rhetoric/.

  36. Emily Stewart, “Fox News’s FBI Coup Conspiracy Theory, Explained,” Vox, December 18, 2017, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/12/18/16790592/fox-news-coup.

  37. Snyder, Road to Unfreedom, 232.

  38. The point is made by Brotherton, Suspicious Minds, 68.

  39. Brotherton, 78.

  40. Glenn Kessler, “Huckabee’s ‘Kenya’ Clarification Also Raises More Questions,” Washington Post, March 2, 2011, http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2011/03/huckabees_kenya_clarification.html. Also see Jennifer L. Hochschild and Katherine Levine Einstein, Do Facts Matter? Information and Misinformation in American Politics (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015), 108–9.

  41. Ronald Reagan, “Inauguration Address,” January 20, 1981, Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History, and Diplomacy, Yale Law School, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/reagan1.asp.

  Chapter 2. It’s True Enough

  1. Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman, “Trump Aides Address His Wiretap Claims: ‘That’s above My Pay Grade,’ ” New York Times, March 7, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/07/us/politics/trump-wiretap-claim-obama.html.

  2. Bryan Clark, “Rep Shares Article Saying Charlottesville Was ‘Set-Up,’ Idaho Post Register, August 18, 2017, http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2017/aug/18/idaho-state-rep-shares-article-saying-charlottesvi/.

  3. Cass R. Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule, “Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures,” Journal of Political Philosophy 17, no. 2 (2009): 202–27, 204.

  4. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 5.

  5. Hofstadter noted that his case studies, covering topics ranging from the Bavarian illuminati to anti-Communists in the 1950s, focused on minority movements and marginal elements in American society; Paranoid Style, 10.

  6. Hofstadter, 31.

  7. Hofstadter, 4.

  8. See, for example, Joseph E. Uscinski and Joseph M. Parent, American Conspiracy Theories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 154.

  9. Brian L. Keeley, “Of Conspiracy Theories,” Journal of Philosophy 96, no. 3 (March 1999): 109–26, 124.

  10. Quoted in Hofstadter, Paranoid Style, 7.

  11. Keeley, “Of Conspiracy Theories,” 124.

  12. Hofstadter, Paranoid Style, 36.

  13. Eli Yokley, “Many Republicans Doubt Clinton Won the Popular Vote,” Morning Consult, July 26, 2017, https://morningconsult.com/2017/07/26/many-republicans-think-trump-won-2016-popular-vote-didnt/.

  14. Adam J. Berinsky, “Rumors, Truths, and Reality: A Study of Political Misinformation” (unpublished manuscript, May 22, 2012, version 3.1), accessed September 27, 2018, http://web.mit.edu/berinsky/www/files/rumor.pdf.

  15. Uscinski and Parent, American Conspiracy Theories, 90–91.

  16. Brendan Nyhan, “Why More Democrats Are Now Embracing Conspiracy Theories,” New York Times, February 15, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/15/upshot/why-more-democrats-are-now-embracing-conspiracy-theories.html.

  17. Uscinski and Parent, American Conspiracy Theories, 151.

  18. Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler, “When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions,” Political Behavior 32, no. 2 (June 2010): 303–30.

  19. Chris Cillizza, “Donald Trump Still Has No Evidence That His Wiretapping Claim Was Right,” CNN, September 19, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2017/09/19/politics/trump-wiretapping-manafort/index.html.

  20. Berinsky, “Rumors, Truths, and Reality,” 15.

  21. Peter Knight, “Outrageous Conspiracy Theories: Popular and Official Responses to 9/11 in Germany and the United States,” New German Critique 103, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 165–93, 165.

  22. Morning Consult/Politico poll, cited in Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Crown, 2018), 197.

  23. Uscinski and Parent, American Conspiracy Theories, 130–53.

  24. Some philosophers would argue that all beliefs rest on a kind of true-enoughness, or verisimilitude. In this view, we never validate our beliefs to the point of perfect certainty; we can only attempt to falsify them, and beliefs that have stood the test of falsification are corroborated. Yet even so, they might be falsified in the future, which is why we cannot have perfect certainty in them: our beliefs have a verisimilitude or truth-likeness when they survive falsification tests, even if we cannot say for sure that they are true. True-enoughness as we see it, by contrast, is not subject to any falsification test. If it seems possible, it satisfies the true-enough test. See Karl R. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Hutchinson, 1959).

  25. Daniel A. Effron, “Why Trump Supporters Don’t Mind His Lies,” New York Times, April 28, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/28/opinion/sunday/why-trump-supporters-dont-mind-his-lies.html.

  26. Adam Berinsky argues that the degree to which people assent to propositions they know are factually inaccurate (because they derive expressive satisfaction from the act of assent) is very small. His study only tested for respondents who express beliefs that contradict what they genuinely believe—for instance, those who believe Obama was born in the US but derive expressive satisfaction from saying he was born in Kenya. Our focus is different: that people are motivated by tribal loyalties. We are not claiming that they are motivated by tribal loyalties to affirm things they know are incorrect—we accept Berinsky’s findings. It is consistent with these findings to hold that people both assent to and believe conspiracist claims because they seem true enough. See Adam J. Berinsky, “Telling the Truth about Believing the Lies? Evidence for the Limited Prevalence of Expressive Survey Responding,” Journal of Politics 80, no. 1, published online October 26, 2017, https://doi.org/10.1086/694258.

  27. A steady stream of research finds a link between conspiracy thinking and party attachment. Even without agreement on the dynamic, this finding remains strong. See Joseph E. Uscinski and Santiago Olivella, “The Conditional Effect of Conspiracy Thinking on Attitudes toward Climate Change,” Research and Politics 4, no. 4 (October 2017): 1–9. Brendan Nyhan adds to partisanship whether the party is in or out of power: “Why More Democrats Are Now Embracing Conspiracy Theories,” The Upshot, New York Times, February 15, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/15/upshot/why-more-democrats-are-now-embracing-conspiracy-theories.html.

  28. Kathy Francovic, “Beli
ef in Conspiracies Largely Depends on Political Identity,” YouGov poll, December 26, 2016, https://today.yougov.com/news/2016/12/27/belief-conspiracies-largely-depends-political-iden/.

  29. Julia Glum, “Some Republicans Still Think Obama Was Born in Kenya as Trump Resurrects Birther Conspiracy Theory,” Newsweek, December 11, 2017, http://www.newsweek.com/trump-birther-obama-poll-republicans-kenya-744195.

  30. Kate Starbird, “Information Wars: A Window into the Alternative Media Ecosystem,” Medium, March 14, 2017, https://medium.com/hci-design-at-uw/information-wars-a-window-into-the-alternative-media-ecosystem-a1347f32fd8f.

  31. Jerome Bruner, “The Narrative Construction of Reality,” Critical Inquiry 18 (Autumn 1991): 1–20.

  32. Robert Jay Lifton on Bruner in “The Assault on Reality,” Dissent, April 10, 2018, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/assault-on-reality-robert-lifton-trump.

  33. Michael Hiltzik, “Stephen Glass Is Still Retracting His Fabricated Stories—18 Years Later,” Los Angeles Times, December 15, 2015, http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-stephen-glass-is-still-retracting-20151215-column.html.

  34. Cited in Thomas B. Edsall, “Democracy Can Plant the Seeds of Its Own Destruction,” New York Times, October 19, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/19/opinion/democracy-populism-trump.html.

  35. PolitiFact (@PolitiFact), “Trump said, ‘Some people say (Michael Flynn) lied and some people say he didn’t lie. I mean, really, it turned out maybe he didn’t lie.’ This isn’t in question,” Twitter, June 15, 2018, 11:12 a.m., https://twitter.com/politifact/status/1007687181266243585; Jon Greenberg et al., “Fact-Checking Donald Trump’s Interviews with Fox and Friends, Reporters on the White House Lawn,” PolitiFact, June 15, 2018, http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2018/jun/15/fact-checking-donald-trumps-unusual-white-house-la/.

  36. Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2018), 29.

  37. “Your reputation is amazing … I will not let you down,” Trump told Jones, as quoted in Matt Ford, “The Legal War on Alex Jones,” New Republic, May 29, 2018, https://newrepublic.com/article/148562/legal-war-on-alex-jones.