My Theory About Conspiracy Theorists Based on My Experiences With Them In Pop Culture

 

In  the 'A Critic At Large' segment of last week's New Yorker the author took a look at the most prominent podcasters who he considers, rightfully in most cases,  peddlers in conspiracy theory. His main focus was Joe Rogan, but he also mention familiar names such as Theo Vonn and Alex Jones.

I knew much of these individuals backstories before and they're discussed so regularly here that, even if I listened to any of them (I don't know how to find podcasts online much less have the time to do so) I would have nothing to contribute. What I want to talk about is how the author chose to introduce the article.

He talked about growing up as a youth and a teenager listening to AM and FM radio late at night with numerous radio personalities who engaged in discussion of conspiracy theories, most notably the idea the moon landing was a fake. He went through nearly two pages of their history and you couldn't ignore the nostalgia factor in the way he talked about them. I actually found this entire part more troubling then anything he told me about Rogan and his colleagues.

Because it seemed to be making two arguments: that listening to conspiracy theories used to be fun and harmless before people started making money and political capital on them (ruining it for all of us) and that it was perfectly harmless as long as it was kept to the fringes of our society.

The first concept is part of the larger argument of the left on everything, and I'd say it speaks to a kind of jealousy. The second is troubling considering that the kind of reasoning behind conspiracy theories involves mental illness and he seemed to be make the contradictory argument that it was fun to listen to the nuts late at night and now is ruined because the nuts are everywhere.

Now as someone who has suffered his entire life from a mental illness that until only the last twenty years managed to reach a position where it was considered not a handicap I say this to the author with all sincerity: "Go fuck yourself." The way you listened to people who were clearly mentally unwell and thought it was not only not sad or disturbing as a child but entertaining speaks to the same kind of sickness  of any other form of prejudice.

And considering that we're only now starting to have a reckoning with conspiracy theories and mental illness – and critically only after a major political party is utilizing it to shore it up for votes – the fact that you're only now considering it a mental insufficiency (which in your mind is a way to further dehumanize people who disagree with you) shows your own blindness on the subject.

Because conspiracy theories have always been capable of doing damage. It doesn't matter if the Klan was doing it to use white supremacy or in the 1920s firm up Anti-Catholic sentiment, the left-wing delusions of communism being an acceptable form of government all through the Cold War and well after or the John Birch Society and its belief of government interference when it comes to putting fluoride in the drinking water. They might now have been mainstream but that is not the same thing as harmless.  This is, as you might expect, part of the liberal bias of 'no intelligent person would believe this kind of nonsense', therefore arguing conspiracy theorist by design are idiots and unworthy of recognition.

And more to the point of my article I came of age in an era where conspiracy theories were getting out of the fringes and I didn't have to stay up late night to listen to the radio to find them. No, they were coming to a theater near me and often to my TV screen.

I'm not for the record talking about shows like The X-Files: Chris Carter himself always admitted he was less in control of the engine more than driving it. I'm talking about a lot of the major films and TV shows that were coming out during this period.

The most prominent was Oliver Stone's JFK which I've talked about at length and multiple time and is more or less based on the theorizing of an actual conspiracist L. Fletcher Prouty.  Prouty was never a reliable source at the time and Stone not only making him a technical adviser but having Donald Sutherland play a character based on him in that film is, in my opinion, the cinematic equivalent of any right-wing conspiracy radio broadcaster give voice to lies about mass shootings or 9/11.  And indeed Stone was pilloried in the press at the time. But he has never backed away from either his positions or his narrative within thirty years despite the fact that there is no more evidence for it then there was at the time.

Furthermore throughout that film and his follow-up Nixon Stone argues that there were forces in the CIA conspiring not just to have JFK killed but Bobby Kennedy as well. This is a theory, I should mention, that his son believes very strongly to this day. I wonder if Stone wants to take credit for his part in that.

Spike Lee to an extent has done so in some of his movies, usually with less direct reference. In Malcolm X, in addition to doing much to clean up the actual activists image in America, he chose to argue the conspiracy theory that the Nation of Islam combined with the FBI conspired to have Malcolm killed. He has made it clear in When The Levees Broke that the government chose to blow up the dams and flood the poor sections of New Orleans in Hurricane Katrina, a theory that has no more evidence today then it did sixteen years ago. And in Black Klansman he has a scene where a survivor of the Tulsa Massacre relates his story to a Black Power meeting arguing the race riots happened because of the screening of Birth Of A Nation which has never been confirmed. I have no doubt Lee was using it just to bolster an old argument of his that Hollywood has been part of white supremacy going back to that point and by showing films like Gone With The Wind in the prologue as a Klan recruitment drive he's not being subtle about it.

 Now I don't pretend that Birth of A Nation didn't have a role in leading to the rise in Klan recruitment nor that Gone With The Wind is one of the most troubling great films in history. But to blame both those movies for the systematic racism in America is a case of the tail wagging the dog. Ben-Hur didn't lead to rise in fundamentalist Christianity across the country and The Godfather didn't lead to the Mafia retaking over Las Vegas.  But the idea that America was on the road to racial equality and then Birth and Gone set the cause back thirty years doesn't read with how America was. But in the eyes of Lee that does seem to be a factor.

And it's worth noting The X-Files when it dealt with the biggest conspiracy theories – JFK's assassination and King's  - they saw them through very much the same mindset as Stone or Lee might. King's version argued that he was killed because he was starting to 'speak like a Maoist' on the subject of Vietnam. "And if he convinced Negroes not to fight in Vietnam, we'll lose," a young CSM says. "And then the first domino will have fallen." They determined to have King killed by a 'cracker patsy and the issue will become very black and white'.

That version of events, I should be clear, was basically a satire by the X-Files writers but I'm pretty sure there are some people who believe it as gospel.  And then there was this theory that came out in the 1990s that I heard echoed on Law & Order in 1997 and is essentially a plot point of Snowfall. That the crack cocaine epidemic was staged by the CIA in order to fund the war in El Salvador as part of the Iran Contra Affair. To be clear there's no evidence even today that this is a remotely true. But among the African-American community it’s apparently still prominent enough that John Singleton made it a plot point of his successful TV show.

If you've been paying attention to these conspiracy theories you'll notice a common thread. All of them are theories that are prominent held by elements of the left wing. They argued for the continue of the military industrial complex, white supremacy, the prison industrial complex, the false nature of the Cold War, etc., etc. None of them decades after the fact have any more credible evidence behind them then anything Trump and his colleagues have circulated over the past twenty years whether they involve Obama's birth certificate, election conspiracies and or vaccines being a lie. And their believers are just as adamant about them as the ones who listen to Rogan's podcast. And to be clear none of them took place on the fringes. They were in big budget films that grossed big at the box offices and were nominating for Oscars and even one a few. They involved TV shows that were critically acclaimed and were watched by millions.

To be clear I'm aware that because all of these movies and TV shows are works of entertainment their creators have the benefit of saying that they were fictionalizing history rather then telling a true version of events. I'd argue that's the exact same hair-splitting that has allowed the right to label Rush Limbaugh and Fox News broadcasters as entertainers rather than news for decades, but fine. Movie makers and TV shows have been dramatizing history since the medium began with far less faithfulness to details then to what makes a better story so I can excuse that at least.

The problem is that when you put into production a work of film and television that a studio puts behind it, that is shown to the masses, the overwhelming majority of the public isn't going to be able to tell that its fact from fiction unless they do the work themselves. I'm no different. When I first saw JFK when I was in my late teens I genuinely believed that Stone's telling of events was based on historical records and that he had access to information that I might not have read. I didn't know until decades later how much of Stone's work was based purely on a conspiracy theorist. I'd long discounted his version of events as well as his personal political bias but it wasn't until I did my own work I knew how far from the reservation Stone was – and that in a sense he'd gone down the rabbit hole and never came out.

How many people saw JFK over the last thirty years and went down their own rabbit holes? Considering just how prominent the conspiracy theory culture started to become even before the creation of social media and podcast I think it was a pretty sizable number.  And how many of them have gone on to become Alex Jones and Theo Vonn and Joe Rogan listeners? I'd be gob-smacked if there wasn't a significant overlap. How far do you have to go from the government killed JFK to the government is putting poison in vaccines? Don't pretend its that much of a stretch. Again if you don't believe me ask our current secretary of HHS.

What's the difference, at a fundamental level, from the kind of person who believes the CIA was behind the crack epidemic and the kind who believes the Justice Department rigged the election of 2020? For the record I think both are equally insane and that if you believe either one of them, there's something fundamentally broken with you and you probably need professional health. But I'm relatively sure that in today's society there are people who have a deep and abiding belief that the former is true despite all the evidence to the contrary and that those who believe the latter is true are what's wrong with America today and that there are people who believe just as firmly the exact inverse is the case.  Both groups would consider themselves the rational ones and the other group members of the lunatic fringe. And consequently their beliefs would justify dismissing the other outright and argue anyone who tried to argue their beliefs were false as part of the conspiracy.  Their could be factors such as race, age or education among either group but that does nothing to make members of them deluded in their own way.

Conspiracy theories have the benefit of taking the realities of the universe which are almost always dictated by random chance and arguing that there is a plan behind it, an individual or group, to give certainty in an uncertain world. I don't deny that there is some comfort in the idea; it's why they become popular in the first place. But it’s comfort based on a lie. Despite the radical differences between the conspiracies I've discussed here and the ones that are popular on the podcasts I've mention they have the same theory: you can't trust the institutions. Not experts, not the educational system, certainly not our government.  And all during the 1990s and ever since we've seen the danger that those who believe in conspiracies pose to our society. That threat isn't existential, far too often it can lead to violence and it often has.

And that may be the real reason I have the biggest problem with the handwringing in The New Yorker article about how dangerous conspiracy theorists on podcasts and traditional media are and how they're wrecking the 'liberal consensus'.  Last I checked Oliver Stone and Spike Lee are among the most liberal you can imagine and they've been hawking conspiracy theories in their movies and TV shows with no evidence long before Rogan took the airwaves.  Stone has never backed down from his theories about the Kennedy assassination thirty years after the fact.  When you say that JFK's assassination was a coup d'etat over and over for that long  you don't think that hurts our faith in democracy in its own way?

I've been fortunate that I can understand the difference between conspiracy theory as entertainment and as gospel. I've never been convinced that the number of people around the world who can do the same has ever been as small as those who are clutching their pearls over these podcasters say that it is now. I think they were always out there, mostly too afraid to say anything because they were terrified of being ridiculed by the masses.  So they held their tongues and maybe limited it to talking on a radio show late at night when they were sure none of their friends could hear them. Just because people like the author dismissed them as entertainment doesn't mean they didn't genuinely believe what they did.

So yes, the right does have much to answer for when it comes to the culture of conspiracy theory we live in today. But don't think I haven't forgotten for a moment how dirty the hands of so many good leftist thinkers are in stoking the conspiracy theory culture into the daylight and how much oxygen they were given by those liberal journals themselves when they praised them as art rather than dealt with the troubling views that were expressed.  You want Joe Rogan to do a mea culpa? Well so do the Stones and Lees of the world and I don't see that happening any time soon, either.