Conspiracy theories and their discontents
Albert Watkins, attorney for the "Q-Anon Shaman" Jacob Chansley, had this to say the other day:
A lot of these defendants — and I’m going to use this colloquial term, perhaps disrespectfully — but they’re all fucking short-bus people,” Watkins told TPM. “These are people with brain damage, they’re fucking retarded, they’re on the goddamn spectrum.
Now, of course, it's no surprise that a lawyer who would take on such a client is not, how shall we say, the most empathetic and even-measured of men. We won't go into his disparagement of those with mental disabilities. But he continued with this [emphasis mine]:
But they’re our brothers, our sisters, our neighbors, our coworkers — they’re part of our country. These aren’t bad people, they don’t have prior criminal history. Fuck, they were subjected to four-plus years of goddamn propaganda the likes of which the world has not seen since fucking Hitler.
One of the things I've stressed over and over again on these pages is to not bring conspiracy theories here. They're not welcome, and any such comments will get deleted, with banning the poster an option of last resort. Now, I'm not saying there aren't conspiracies; of course there are. But true conspiracies rarely remain hidden. Eventually they come out, because there are too many moving parts, as with the Tuskegee experiment on Black men.
No, what I'm talking about are the outlandish conspiracies which infest the banlieues of both Right and Left: the Bilderberg retreat controls the world, George Soros is plotting a world socialist government, 9/11 was an inside job, and so on.
"What's the harm," one could ask. It's harmless. They're simply kooks whom no one takes seriously. Anyone who goes on TV to spout off this nonsense is immediately shunned.
The years since 2015 and Donald Trump's entry into the political arena should disabuse anyone of that notion. The most powerful country in the world's history was brought to its knees because its chief executive was a purveyor of and believer in outlandish, ridiculous conspiracy theories. He brought millions of voters into his demented worldview. The result was the insurrection, and the debasement of our political and moral life, with one party becoming nothing but a personality cult devoted to its orange-hued Messiah.
Conspiracy theories are so dangerous because there's no way to disprove them. You can lay out facts and analysis and logic, and none of it matters. You're deluded, or worse, in with "them", and thus a mortal enemy. And it never ends. You can always find another reason, another bit of esoteric information to reify your belief system and go further down the rabbit hole. How? Well, this:
As Donald Trump's legal problems continue to mount, some would think that his dire straits would be a refutation to the predictions and conspiracy theories disseminated by the QAnon movement, but true to QAnon form, adherents to the movement are saying it's all part of "the plan."
As VICE News points out, this claim is popping up on pro-Trump message boards where QAnon adherents are claiming the news is meant to distract from Arizona's audit of votes from the 2020 election and derail Trump's chances at winning in 2024.
"Do you think they realize how much MOAR powerful Trump will be after being falsely arrested?" a Telegram user called TruthHammer wrote.
Once you get sucked into one of these theories, it's as hard to rescue yourself as from drugs or drink. They become your life's motive force, giving meaning to a seemingly meaningless, cruel world. Nothing is going the way you want it to go, so there must be someone or something to blame, and there must be someone out there in whom you can put your faith that he or she will sort out everything. Most of the time it is harmless. Until a demagogue comes onto the stage and traduces all of the state's norms and traditions. Then you realize just how fragile this construct we call "civilization" is.
Conspiracy theories are now a weapon of war, as governments inimical to our interests weaponize them and spread disinformation to sow division. As outright war between major powers becomes more and more unthinkable, those weaker powers have sought to gain advantage by using the arts of subterfuge, fueling belief in these conceptions with no tether to reality. Reality is what you say it is, alternative facts are just as valid, if not more so, than observable and verifiable phenomena. A republic cannot survive if a large portion of its citizens don't live in the same mental space as the majority.