Show me the birth certificate! How America’s internet-enabled conspiracist media culture is destroying American politics
By: The Hannah Arendt Center
Tags: Conspiracy Theories, Truth, Immigrants, Government, Politics

This piece was originally published in Volume 1 of HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities at Bard College.

Lewis Lapham, who spoke from this podium earlier in the day, said something interesting. He said, “The truth doesn’t have a big fan base. It’s not a popular product.” That really echoed for me because that is exactly what I heard from certain publishers when I pitched my book about conspiracy theories. At first, they were excited, “Oh, you’re writing a book about conspiracy theories. Great! You believe the lizards are taking over…or maybe some kind of zombie apocalypse?” I said, “No, no, no this is a book against conspiracy theories — a book about how we all have to be more rational.” The publishers became much less excited. They said, “Well, it sounds a little dry.” But then, Adam Bellow, an editor at Harper Collins, took a chance on me. And for that, I am grateful. The result was my book Among the Truthers: A Journey Through America’s Growing Conspiracist Underground, which came out earlier in 2011.

I think it is important to talk about this subject at a conference dedicated to the subject of “truth-telling,” such as this — because conspiracy theories are both a symptom and a cause of a media culture and an Internet culture that promotes nonsense, for reasons I’m going to explain.

But, before I get into the theory, I’d like to give you a case study, which involves something that happened after my book was published. The case study involves Anders Breivik, who killed dozens of people in Norway in July of 2011. At the time, I was on a book tour. But one night, I instinctively went back to a lot of the conspiracy theory websites that I had used to research my book, because I was curious what the conspiracy theorists were saying about this horrible mass slaughter. Of course, we all know the truth of it. The killer composed a turgid 1,400 page manifesto explaining his dark motives — no mystery there. But still, I was interested in what the conspiracy theorists were saying about what they imagined the real story was.

What was interesting to me was that the conspiracy theories about the Norway killings actually broke down into three different sub-genres, and I’m going to go briefly through them.

The first conspiracy theory was that the Norway shootings were actually a clever plot by Muslims to discredit cultural conservatives in Europe. The lead on this particular conspiracy theory was taken by a website that some of you may know called WorldNetDaily. It has become infamous as the clearing-house for Barack Obama Birther conspiracy theories, but they also dabble in other conspiracies. This is what appeared a day or two after the Norway shooting.

“This has all the appearances of a cover-up.” radio host Michael Savitch told WorldNetDaily, “They created their Reichstag fire, they found their Timothy McVeigh, they created their Jack Ruby. How could one man have blown up downtown Oslo and then raced to the island to kill those teenagers? This is likely a fabrication of the Norwegian labor party, which needs to hold on to power to enforce their multiculturalist Muslim favoring anti-nationalist views.”

That was the first conspiracy theory — that it was Muslims and multilateralists who were trying to discredit conservatives.

The second Norway conspiracy theory was that the attacks were actually part of a “New World Order” plot to create fear and anxiety in Europe, so that the “globalists” could ram a collectivist banking agenda down Europe’s throat. A fellow named Alex Jones took the lead on this one. I’m not sure if people in this room know who Jones is. He has a popular radio show, and he is a particular hero among libertarians. Here is the way Jones reported the Norway shootings.

“They are now pulling out all the stops in an effort to crush resistance to endless bailouts, designed to crash local economies and destroy national sovereignty. It is no mistake the corporate media is comparing Anders Breivik to Timothy McVeigh. Hours after the terrorist attack Norway public broadcasters said the attack resembled the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma, which as we all know, was a false-flag event used to roll out draconian aspects of the American police state in the 1990’s. Breivik is obviously just a patsy for those seeking to destroy political opposition to the world’s neo-liberal bankers.”

So, the first conspiracy theory is that it was Muslims and multiculturalists. The second conspiracy theory is that it was the world’s bankers.

The third conspiracy theory was that Anders Breivik was actually a stooge of the Israelis, purportedly because Israel wanted to publish Norway’s pro-Palestinian politicians. The lead on this one was taken by a 9/11 conspiracy theorist by the name of Kevin Barrett, who lives in Wisconsin. He said, “Friday’s bloodbath in progressive Norway bears the markings of an Israeli moosad false flag terror attack. No Western country has supported the Palestinian cause more than the Norwegians.”

So, there you have it. Anders Breivik was a tool of the bankers, the Jews, or the Muslims. Take your pick.

Of course, we know all of this is nonsense, but its representative nonsense. It’s representative of the millions of conspiracy theories that you’re going to find on the Internet. Because, first of all, what are conspiracy theories? They are theories of evil — evil such as the mass-murdering kind that Breivik epitomizes. Such theories answer the question: Why do bad things happen to good people? This is a question that used to be answered through religion. But for many people, we now live in a post-religious world. As a result, we have to make up new narratives that attempt to make sense of horrible things.

The second thing my three Norway examples show, and this is something I didn’t know going into the project, is that all conspiracy theories are essentially exchangeable.

Originally, I thought I was going to have to spend 10 years researching my book, because there are so many conspiracy theories out there. Yet it turns out that conspiracy theories actually are remarkably similar. They all follow the same structure. The structure is this: that there is evil in the world — terrorist attacks, depressions, wars — but that all of these evil acts are perpetrated by a small group of conspiring men (it is always men, not women) in a smoke filled room, somewhere in the world, trying to further some kind of evil agenda. What is interesting is that, for purposes of this narrative, the actual identity of the evildoer — Jew, Muslim, banker — is fairly inter-changeable.

In one chapter of my book, I talk about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion — a notorious anti-Semitic hoax published in the early part of the 20th century alleging that the Jews of the world were conspiring to produce revolutions, wars, depressions, all manner of evil to further their sinister Jewish agenda. What I found is that if you take the Protocols as your starting point, and then you replace the word “Jew” with the word “Muslim,” you actually wind up with something that closely resembles a lot of stuff that appears on militant right-wing websites today. Or you can replace the word “Jew” with “Bilderberger,” or “New World Order follower.” Or you can replace “Jew” with “Catholic,” and get a Dan Brown novel.

The point is that the structure of conspiracy theories is remarkably consistent, which is why I urge the readers of my book to read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Not because the Protocols are true, obviously, but because it is a blueprint for so much of the conspiracism and nonsense that we see on the Internet today. Ancient conspiracism helps us understand modern conspiracism.

When I started analyzing these conspiracy theories, I ended up reading a lot of manifestos that were very similar to the Protocols. But I also went out and actually started interviewing conspiracy theorists. Now, this seems like a fairly obvious thing to do when you are writing a book about conspiracy theories. But it turns out that not many authors have done it. Most books about conspiracy theories are either promoting conspiracy theories (which sell very well — the bookstores are full of them), or they’re books making fun of conspiracy theories, which is very easy to do, since many of these theories are ridiculous. But very few people have actually sat down with conspiracy theorists and asked them what they think.

When I sat down with these people, I had two questions for them. The first was: “What do you believe?” The second was: “When did you start believing it?”

If you ask a 9/11 conspiracy theorist, “What do you believe happened on 9/11?” they’ll start telling you that first Dick Cheney’s CIA minions put the bombs in the Twin Towers. Then his friends at NORAD shut down the entire flight defense system over North America. I’m a former engineer, a nerd, I like video games and sci-fi, and at first I was interested in this technical Tom Clancy type stuff. But, after a couple of months of hearing this sci-fi fantasy, I got bored of hearing the details. In fact, I realized I was hearing the same details over and over and over.

What was much more interesting was asking my interviewees the second question — when did they starting believing conspiracy theories.

As I said before, conspiracy theories are narratives about why bad things happen, about why evil exists in the world. But, they are also narratives of distrust. The people who believe in conspiracy theories obviously don’t trust the government, or the media, or any public institutions. (When I told my interviewees I was an editor for the National Post in Canada, they just took it for granted that I am a professional liar who gets his marching orders every week from George Soros or the Zionists or whoever they imagine the ultimate paymaster is.) And so when you ask a conspiracy theorist, “When did you start believing that 9/11 was an inside job?”, you’re asking them a very personal question. You are essentially asking them the question: “When did your world fall apart? When did you start believing that everybody was lying to you?” That is a very personal question, and I got some very interesting answers.

What I found was that different people had their own very different, very personalized points of entry into the world of conspiracy. But once they went down that rabbit hole, once the trust was broken, they became vulnerable to every conspiracy theory under the sun. You very rarely run into someone who believes only one conspiracy theory. Typically, what happens is that at first they’ll buy into one conspiracy theory, then they’ll get on the Internet, they’ll get on a few websites, they’ll start watching some videos, and before you know it, they believe dozens of conspiracy theories.

And when does this distrust start? Where is the point of entry?

For a lot of liberal 9/11 conspiracy theorists, it didn’t start right after 9/11, but rather in 2003 when they found out there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The first question they asked is: What else is the government lying about? When you ask that question, the extrapolation of it can lead you into some very dark areas, and you start believing that the government is lying about everything, from what vaccines to take to whether cigarettes are bad for you, to whether there are UFOs in Colorado- to who destroyed the Twin Towers. After all, that was the event that ultimately led to the Iraq War, right?

One guy I interviewed for the book is a former NFL football player. He played defensive end for the New York Jets, and he’s now a successful investment banker in Toronto. He is Serbian by ancestry and he became radicalized during the Kosovo conflict in 1999. He started to believe, with some justification (there’s always a grain of truth behind these things), that NATO wasn’t telling us the full story about the Balkans. He believed there was a campaign of lies against Serbia. He told me that he thought that the videos showing the brutalization of Kosovar Albanians had been doctored in a studio.

Once that trust had been broken for this guy, he started to see everything through the same distrustful lens. So, two years after the Kosovo conflict, when 9/11 happened, he saw those terrible events through the same lens and became a 9/11 conspiracy theorist.

In some cases, the source of the distrust is something very personal. I interviewed some people whose children had autism and they had become convinced that their children’s condition was a result of vaccines that the children had taken, in particular the MMR vaccine. Believing that, they also came to believe that the pharmaceutical companies and the government, the FDA in particular, were lying to them about tests they had conducted on these vaccines. If the FDA was lying to them about the vaccines, and the government was lying to protect the FDA…what else was the government lying about? And from then on, they start believing all sorts of things.

No matter the reason that a person had been brought into the world of conspiracy, it was very difficult to bring them out again. It was very rare that you could get a conspiracy theorist to “recover.” Once their trust is broken with the powers that be, it is like a broken relationship — it is very hard to build the trust back.

One thing I confess in the last chapter of my book is that I’ve never won an argument with a conspiracy theorist. I spent three years working on the book, speaking with conspiracy theorists and never once was I able to convince any of these people that…you know, maybe it was al-Qaeda behind 9/11, or maybe Barack Obama was actually born in Hawaii. That’s because, for the people who adopt these theories, it becomes a worldview. It becomes like a form of religion. And like all religions, it becomes very precious to these people, because it is an explanation for evil. And, they hang on to it as a sort of security blanket to explain why bad things happen.

Unlike real religions, conspiracy theories do not supply gods, but they do supply something that might be even more important than gods for some people — they supply demons. They supply a singular address for evil upon which you can blame everything.

And, in some cases, they provide literal demons. Many of the extreme Obama birthers you talk to actually do believe that Barack Obama is either the Anti-Christ, or the false prophet from the book of Revelation. So, the political conspiracy theory actually becomes a secularized version of the religious conspiracy theory that is embedded in the last book of the New Testament.

Because conspiracy theories are an explanation for evil, they always flourish in the aftermath of terrible, evil, historical events. In the modern era, the first great conspiracy theories emerged in the aftermath of the French Revolution. We now look back at the French Revolution and focus on some of the positive ideological principles that came out of it. But at the time, of course, thousands of people were dying; you had blood running in the streets; you had “The Terror.” A lot of people became convinced that the French Revolution must have been a plot by the Jews, for instance. More than a century later, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion became popular in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and WWI, when all of Europe was aflame. You also had conspiracy theories after JFK’s assassination, after 9/11, and after the 2008 financial crisis, as I explain in my book.

But conspiracy theories also have a political function — not just a psychological or quasi-spiritual function: For militant political movements, conspiracy theories act as a bridge between political ideology and reality.

Take Barack Obama Birthers, for instance. Let’s say you spent your entire political life believing that America is a right-wing country, and that it would never elect a left-wing Harvard type like Barack Obama — a community organizer from Chicago, no less. And then along comes the 2008 election, and this is exactly what America does. This shatters your view of the world. It is comforting to think that somehow that historical episode never happened, that it is illegitimate, that it is a hoax, that somehow if you do enough investigation, and if you count enough pixels on a PDF of Barack Obama’s electronic birth certificate, that you can somehow discover “the truth”. You can roll back presidential history in God’s eyes, and you can show the world that this episode never really happened. You can erase Obama’s presidency, and thereby bring the real world into compliance with the world that exists in your ideology.

This fetish for using conspiracy theories as a tool to change history — to make it align with some militant ideology or other — exists on both sides of the political spectrum. Many 9/11 conspiracy theorists whom I interviewed, for instance, were left-wing ideologues. They had convinced themselves that America was the epicenter and font of all true evil in the world, and this became their mantra. When 9/11 happened, and they were forced to see a truly despicable act of evil happen in their own backyard perpetrated by America’s enemies, it did not compute. There was this cognitive dissonance that arose between their ideology, which was anti-American, and the reality, which was that America’s enemies had perpetrated this epic signature act of evil. They were able to bring ideology and reality into a unified whole only by creating a theory that somehow this act of terrorism had been inflicted on America by its own leaders. So, it protects them from cognitive dissonance. It is a bridge between ideology and reality.

A common question I often get about the book: “Are there real conspiracies out there?” And the answer is, of course: Iran-Contra, Watergate, Teapot Dome. In Canada, we had something called the Sponsorship Scandal, which no one here has heard of. It involved the Liberal Party and their fundraising irregularities. Real conspiracies do happen. They tend to be small, they tend to be grubby, and they tend to be about money or sex. They don’t tend to be about taking over the planet in the name of the Vatican, or the Bilderbergers. That’s the way you can tell a real conspiracy from a bogus conspiracy theory.

I was on the Diane Rehm show on NPR, and a lot of people who phoned in said, “You know, I lived through the JFK era. That conspiracy-theory stuff is nothing new. We had our own conspiracy theories back in the day. This is exactly what we went through 50 years ago.” And there is truth in that. But, there is a huge difference between then and now. And that difference, in a word, is the Internet.

Back in the era of JFK, if you were a conspiracy theorist and you wanted to get the word out about your far-out theory, it was hard. You couldn’t go to an editor of a mainstream newspaper or a magazine. Most would say, “Forget it, I’m not publishing your nonsense.” There were gatekeepers to the media. So, you went around wearing a sandwich board, or you called into radio stations, or you handed out leaflets on the street. You know, we make fun of these things, but if you’re a conspiracy theorist, this was the only option you had back then. You may have had community access television at 2AM in the morning. But otherwise, you really didn’t have many other options, because the media had real gatekeepers.

There is a difference now. Take me, I’m the editor of the op-ed page at the National Post (Canada’s Wall Street Journal, as I like to think of it). I walk around very puffed up. I’m a gatekeeper; I get to decide what opinions get disseminated in my pages. But these days, conspiracy theorists have no time for someone like me. The attitude is “Forget that guy, I’ll just put it on a blog! I’ll make a YouTube video. I’ll cut out the media middleman.” Thanks to this online technology, these folks can completely get around people like me, something that was impossible in the JFK era. That’s why, in my book, I argue that conspiracism has been transformed by the Internet as much as social media or pornography. 99.9% of conspiracism is now done on the Internet. They barely even have conferences anymore. What is the point when you can just create a website or a YouTube video?

And then there’s the rise of cheap digital video — something which obviously did not exist in 1963. How many people here have seen the 9/11 conspiracist film Loose Change? Often, I’m on college campuses and some guy in a 9/11 Truth T-shirt is giving it out for free. This is a really slick video purporting to explain why 9/11 was an inside job. The thing was made on a shoestring. All told, the ease of entry into the media market by conspiracy theorists has gone down by several orders of magnitude since the JFK era.

But the Internet has had another effect, which in some ways is more disturbing because it not only affects conspiracy theorists, it affects mainstream media consumers as well. That is the segmentation of media markets into silos.

Fifty years ago, it didn’t matter if you were a conspiracy theorist. In order to get the news, you had to read the paper, listen to the radio, or watch TV. That was the only way you were going to get the news. It didn’t matter how crazy you were; chances are if you lived in New York, you read The New York Times, or some other major newspaper. There was no other way of getting the news. These days, the people I interviewed for this book, they don’t read the newspaper. Nor do they listen to the radio. (NPR? God forbid.) Nor do they watch TV. In some cases, they don’t even look at websites. Instead, when they wake up in the morning, right there in their inbox, they’d have 50 messages from various conspiracist pals from around the world giving them updates on news items they’ve been following. This is their news source.

This is a really scary thing. And, I see this all the time even among colleagues of mine in the mainstream media. They’ll tell me something and I’ll ask where they heard it and they’d say, “Oh, it’s all over my discussion group.” I would say, “Well, you should check that out, it sounds kind of bogus — like something I should put in my book.”

A lot of times, I’m finding that it is actually middle-aged people who are the most vulnerable to conspiracy theorists. It is a very interesting phenomenon. When I was in university, and I was surrounded by anarchists and Trotskyists and people clutching copies of Ayn Rand’s books, and Scientologists, I couldn’t wait until I grew up and met people who were more “normal.” Well, I grew up. And now FOX News has turned our Grandpas into raving conspiracy maniacs who think George Soros is taking over the world. (I went to Jon Stewart’s rally for sanity in Washington a while back, and they had all these hilarious signs, and the funniest said, “Glen Beck, stop scaring my Dad!”)

The reason for this, once again, has to do with the Internet. I notice there are a few young people in the crowd; and these people know how to use the Internet. If someone sends them a crackpot story, they search for it on Wikipedia, or on Snopes.com, or on some other quasi-reputable site where they can see if something is nonsense. The people I interviewed who were 50, 60, 70, even 80, are different, though: They are hip enough to use the Internet, they’re just not hip enough to use it properly. So when their brother-in-law sends them a link to something about how Barack Obama isn’t a U.S. citizen, they just forward it to their whole address book. (I wrote an article entitled, “Who taught Bubba and Zadie how to use the Internet?” I got hate mail in Yiddish, which was a first for me.)

Then you get to a fundamental question: Does all of this hurt America? This is a question I often get. People say: “Oh, come on, these crackpots are having their fun on the Internet — who cares? This is just a hobby for these people. It’s harmless.”

And yes, for many people, it is just a hobby. I want to emphasize that I am not against the X-Files, I’m not against Thomas Pynchon, I’m not against Dan Brown (whose novels I’ve read, I’ll confess. I thought the movie was terrible but the book was fun.) I’m not against conspiracy theories being used for entertainment. They are fun and they’re titillating. That is the main reason that radio producers decided to put me on their show to promote my book. People are interested in conspiracies.

However, when people make conspiracy theories their worldview, it becomes impossible to have any kind of public discourse. The example I give is: How are you supposed to have an intelligent argument or discussion with someone if that person thinks that ObamaCare is a secret plot to put Grandma before a death panel? What if Grandma herself thinks it’s a plot to put her before a death panel? Likewise, you can’t have a discussion about the legitimacy of Barack Obama’s presidency or his policies with someone who thinks he is an illegal alien. You can’t have a discussion about anti-terrorist policy or foreign affairs or security with someone who thinks that 9/11 was an inside job. It is just impossible. They live in different realities. You can’t span those realities with rationalism.

The question is: What can we do about this? Obviously, Hannah Arendt supplies inspiration because she shows that being a truth-teller is a noble thing. Even if the truth is difficult to accept, even if it might take a lot of time and attention to process, even if it may be boring at times, the truth is important. But I think we also have to accept the fact that the truth can be really difficult. That’s why people like Hannah Arendt are such heroes, telling the truth and accepting the truth when it is very difficult. Writing this book showed me how difficult the truth is for ordinary people. It is very easy for wealthy, well-educated people with brilliant children and grandchildren to accept the world as it is sometimes, because the world for these people is a very sunny place.

Many of the people I interviewed for the book weren’t in that place. They were confronting circumstances in their life; failed businesses, medical situations, which perhaps drove them into the arms of conspiracism. You have to appreciate that. For those people, it is really difficult to accept the truth. I confronted it right here in upstate New York. I flew in from Toronto last night. I went to go eat by myself at a pizza restaurant. I was the only guy in the place. I was sipping my coffee, and the waitress came to talk to me. This being America, and 2011, it took her about eight seconds to talk about how horrible Obama is. It was very sad. She told me she had a mother who was 52 with two degrees and can’t find a job. She herself was working for what I assume was a very low wage in a pizza restaurant. She has a three year old and very little hope for the future. So it didn’t surprise me that she hated Obama and that she thought Obama was responsible for all of her problems.

Ten minutes later, she started talking about immigrants. She talked about a successful immigrant family that she knew who were running not one, but two restaurants now, and had three cars.S he claimed, falsely I think, that they were receiving all kinds of government support because they were Mexican. What she was saying began to creep into what was approaching a conspiracy theory. I thought it was implausible, but I listened to her. I realized for people like that and for tens of millions of other people around the United States, it is really hard to accept a reality where the United States is a second-rate power compared to China, where you’re in danger of losing not one, but two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the economy is a mess, where people’s mortgages are underwater. I realize that a lot of this stuff maybe doesn’t apply to people in this room; but for people for whom it does apply, it is much easier to find one single person or group of people to blame for all their problems than it is to analyze the extremely complex subject of, for instance, mortgage-backed Wall Street securities, which most people can’t understand. So, you blame taxes, or you blame ObamaCare or you blame Obama himself.

The good news, I think, for fighting conspiracy theories, is that the United States, for all its problems now, is actually a wonderful place in one great respect — something that as a Canadian I’ve always admired — and that is its capacity for intellectual self-awareness and change. When you look back at the Civil Rights struggle, you don’t look at Canada or Europe, you look at the United States. In the space of just a generation or two, the United States succeeded in stigmatizing racism, sexism, homophobia, all different pathological forms of discrimination, basically removing them from the polite discourse of politics and even dinner party conversation. All this was done in the space of basically thirty or forty years — an unbelievable achievement in the history of human sociology.

If the United States can do this, if the United States can get rid of these other toxic ‘isms’ from its intellectual discourse, maybe it can do the same with conspiracism. I think one step, obviously, is to engage in conferences like this, which is why it was such a delight for me to come here and attend. Another is to read my book. But, I think a third step is to recognize the problem as a serious problem and not just make fun of people who seem to have odd theories about the way the world works. Its fun to make fun of tea-party types, or 9/11 truthers, or the people handing you leaflets on the street. But, it is a symptom of a serious problem, and I think you have to take the problem seriously. It is what I’ve tried to do in my research and I urge other people to do the same in theirs.