Conspiracy theories are nothing new; they predate modern times. The search for bogeys is human nature. Indeed, we seem to strive to be inhumane, and to deny humanity. Jews. Witches. Masons. Muslims. All were targets in past millennia, before we ever neared modern mass media. The one thing humans in the natural state get credit for is smarts. We are ready-made for reason. Our big brains bias us towards searching for sense amongst the morass of reality.
The JFK assassination is a good example. Lee Harvey Oswald had the personality of a school shooter, with a dash of tankie thrown in. Would this ex-Marine take a golden opportunity to vent lead at somebody powerful? It’s almost harder to believe he’d let such a chance go by. If you don’t know these facts, you’re likely to search for a mysterious second shooter instead.
Conspiracy theories circulate on any kind of media. The Internet was never necessary. Pamphlets and speeches have done immense work to carry the load of numbing the mind. The Anti-Masonic Party flourished in the 1830s United States, obsessed that an old boys’ club was up to no good. A particularly nasty example was The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian fabrication detailing a Jewish plot to achieve world domination. Despite repeated debunkings, noted do-gooder Henry Ford financed a print run of half a million copies in the United States, and the Nazis handed it out to schoolchildren like bitter candies. Entertainment can contain conspiracy, like the bestselling Da Vinci Code, and other Dan Brown books that falsely lay claim to the truth.
What the Internet has done for conspiracy theories is three things. Firstly, what’s gotten much easier is suffocating subjects in a deluge of “evidence”, however shoddy. If you don’t know your stuff, pages and pages of writing, hours of video, can make it harder to dismiss theories as unsubstantiated. Entire sites, like 4chan or Parler, can become an endless series of supporting buttresses for QAnon, every day a new data dump to keep fans invested. Secondly, there is more of a route to actively target new recruits. The passionate faithful, scamsters, and would-be Jim Joneses leaf through profiles to find who to prey on: the elderly, the disenfranchised, the insecure. Thirdly, there are more ways for anybody curious about conspiracies to investigate. Google is free, and the answers you seek are out there on the Internet - maybe not true answers, but likely just what you’re looking for.
The Internet has created “gateways” into conspiracy theories. Maybe you were already disabused of the notion you could trust government, by discrimination or tax take or a failure to protect you. You start out suspecting that jet fuel couldn’t melt steel beams. That suspicion around governments then extends to how the local city council is now fluoriding your water, even though it was fine before. Some Googling reveals to you that this is part of the UN’s agenda for the world. Who will save us? Q, deep in the American heartland.
These “discoveries” go in any order. Many people are convinced their countries are on the wrong tracks, they are losing what they have, things new and unfamiliar are threatening. They want to find reason and logic. The human brain, ever a wonderful thing, intervenes to ensure the theories all come together in ways that seem satisfying.
We are not immune to propaganda. Most people already buy into at least one conspiracy theory, like a second shooter, or an inside job. I'm perfectly willing to buy the idea that Bill Clinton is complicit in Epstein's abuses. Many of us are primed not to trust institutions. The worst is when, sometimes, those institutions prove so unworthy of trust that conspiracy theories turn out to be true! MKUltra and COINTELPRO were illegal operations by US intelligence services to spy on and attack civil rights leaders, and to drug and torture citizens. Both must have sounded like fever dreams to those untouched by it, until documentation of the truth came out. Revelations of occasional surprises get people ready to hear more, and deceitfulness slips in more easily.
Other institutions, like foreign governments, have incentives to undermine “competitors”. They organise & spread more powerfully than ever through the Internet. Russia, for instance, has premier cybercapabilities. Operatives can set up and work farms of new recruits to conspiracy cropping up worldwide. Particularly appealing is how instigators have plausible deniability when theorists lash out and act. They probably don’t even get the blame.
The damage conspiracy theories do, beyond creating out-of-touch, obsessive cranks who alienate friends and family, is how they get behind bad causes and pervert good ones. A particularly disgusting example of this harm is movements against sex trafficking, particularly of children. This is an incredibly valuable cause, often underestimated in the sheer scope and size of such horrific practices. Unfortunately, anti-sex trafficking activism already often suffers diversion to pet projects, like judgemental fake feminists who decry sex work as slavery.
Qanon and their ilk have taken this to a whole new level, overpowering and shouting down hard-working activists to hijack their message. Nobody associated with these conspiracy theories will ever save a single child, and they put more in danger by jeopardizing the real work going on. Instead, they serve only to inflame the latest wave of moral panic about child-snatching. Never mind that, while sex trafficking absolutely exists in the West, it unleashes with far more severity upon regions like Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia. They don’t care. They’re too afraid to make sense, of anything.
Many of the best-known conspiracy theories mentioned here originate from the US. There are so many more that are of great importance to other countries. Turkey has Armenian genocide denial, and broad swathes of Europe like Poland do the same with the Holocaust. George Soros has been Public Enemy Number One of Orbán’s Hungary, the best example of wider links between anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories.
At the end of the day, these return to the same theme at the start: people are afraid, they want someone to blame, and conspiracy theories erect scarecrows that cast dark shadows. Their threat doubles when we let conspiracy theories be defined by JFK and the Twin Towers, as eccentric curiosities. View them by their broader history, as tools essential to getting public support behind bigoted and dangerous falsehoods.
[This article was written at the end of January, as Qanon members faced reckoning: whether they'd finally realise they'd been duped, or burrow ever deeper. As we've seen since, some have gone into each camp, and the movement's far from over. Nor should we miss how some New Zealanders buy in - and it's little wonder when groups like many Māori people have few reasons indeed to trust the state. Keep a watchful eye out for the next Billy Te Kahika.]
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