Angry Planet - From JFK to Qanon: Why Conspiracy Theories Won’t Go Away

Episode Date: September 4, 2018

Conspiracy theories are as old as the republic. Actually, they're a lot older than OUR republic. In every country, in every culture, people believe powerful forces are colluding in ways they know nothing about.Why is that?In this week's bonus episode we talk with Jesse Walker, books editor of Reason magazine and author of "The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory."You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is warcollegepodcast.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. There's a long series of conspiracy theories that basically amount to the country being governed by secret putophile rings. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts. Matthew Galt and Jason Fields.

Hello, welcome to War College. I'm Matthew Galt. And I'm Jason Fields. Conspiracy theories are as old as the Republic, but the latest one seems stranger and more elaborate than most. QAnon is the internet-driven conspiracy theory that supposes Donald Trump is waging a shadow war against satanic pedophiles from inside the White House, and that's the simple version. It seems ridiculous on its face, but QAnon has a loyal following, and they've actually been spotted at Trump rallies holding up Q signs. Recently, Q&ON proponent Michael

Lionel LeBron visited the White House and even took a picture with Donald Trump. Here to help us sort through all of this is Jesse Walker. Walker is the books editor at Reason Magazine and the author of the United States of Paranoia, a conspiracy theory, a book about the history of American conspiracy theories. Jesse, thank you so much for joining us. Well, thank you for inviting me on. So I ask my first question is, is Q&ON really anything new? Q&N itself is sort of the latest and maybe most elaborate remixed version of a bunch of older stories. And in fact, the way it's set up, the open-endedness of it has really encouraged the remixing. I mean, all conspiracy theories, people build on them, adapt them, you know, jettison a bit, add some more,

maybe radically revised them if someone encounters them, but they're coming at it from a different ideology. But the whole sort of Q&on system of someone's sort of dropping clues and then inviting people to come up with their own ways to connect them has really allowed a whole lot of different fears that are in the air to get mixed together. And on top of the fact that there's a fair chance, not just that the original person dropping these clues is a prankster, but that a number of the people, you know, participating in coming up with the versions of the story may well be pranksters. You know, there's a part of what I think has fueled, you know, the absurdity of it. And this really is, I mean, some conspiracy theories you hear them, you say, well, maybe some of that, there could be some truth to it. In this case, it's such a parallel reality that it's very difficult to take seriously unless you've got a reason to be just committed to the idea.

you, unless you're coming at it with some mentality that makes you really want it to be true, it's very difficult to believe. But people do believe it, right? People do believe it. People coming at it. It really is, number one, people definitely do believe it. Some people take it very, very seriously. But number two, it is, oh, how shall I put this? A lot of people compare it to alternate reality games.

These were, they still happen, but they were kind of. of all the rage for a bit about a decade ago, where often to promote a new movie or other sort of media release, someone would drop these clues and people would, you know, participate in, you know, one, it would be like a combination between, it would be like a game that kind of spills out of the computers into reality, into the physical world, almost like a scavenger hunt, but you might have, in one case, one of the clues was actually literally written on a bathroom wall for people to find. People would even be getting phone calls and faxes that would have more clues coming to them.

And I think a lot of the appeal to this is that it's like one of those games. I'm not the first person to make that comparison. And so that kind of leaves open to question. How many of the people are really, really believing it, as we know some are. How many of the people are just sort of having fun with it and not taking it seriously? And how many are in this sort of in-between state where they're kind of of thinking as if, you know, well, what if this is true? And the thing is all three of those people can add their speculations to the pot, you know, online, and someone else might take it

seriously and pick it up. So it's, and obviously we don't have good survey data or anything like that on it. I mean, what we have is things like how many people watch a YouTube video. And as everyone knows, people watch YouTube videos for all sorts of reasons. It might be because they believe it, might be because they're laughing at it. Might be because, you know, it started It took them 30 seconds to turn it off. So we're really coming at this with a lot of, I mean, as outsiders, open questions about the different ways people are using the stories, the different way people are processing the story. And again, it's, I mean, since I think we're all, you know, who are not really far gone, I mean, outside of like the collection of believers, the rest of us kind of recognized that this is nonsense. and there's, and that therefore the person, you know, dropping these things is either deliberately

doing some sort of disinformation or is acting as a prankster or as a profiteer. I mean, that's certainly one thing that's very likely, and one of the stories I've seen it tries to look into who might be behind it, certainly kind of leans in that direction. So it's, when you've got that kind of, I mean, creativity is kind of a misleading word for it because that's kind of a positive word. that kind of mixture of creativity and combustibility, it really just keeps spiraling in different directions. What's interesting now is that it's harder to maintain belief in it because, you know, the most recent events and, you know, the Mueller investigation, you know, what happened with Manafort, also what happened with Cohen, which I know is not strictly speaking part of the Mueller investigation, kind of cuts against this theory, which had it, you know, that the special counsel and the, and the, Donald Trump were secretly working together to clear out this grand putophile conspiracy.

So the question then becomes how do people deal with this? Well, a lot of Q&N predictions have not come true in the past, so someone can keep on ignoring elements of the story or revising the story in order to make it fit. But at some point, this probably starts to fall apart. People sort of drift away from it. But it never completely dies because elements of it are still there to be remixed in the future. just like parts of this story have been used in conspiracy stories, you know, going back decades. Can you get into that a little bit? I'm wondering what some of the historical antecedents are,

what some of the older stories are that are being dredged up now. Well, I mean, there's a long series of conspiracy theories that basically amount to the country being governed by secret putophile rings. Kathy O'Brien is probably the most infamous or was, I mean, until recently, the most infamous example of a conspiracy theorist like this. She claimed that she had been a part of a government mind control program that involved for being passed around among different leaders of the elite. And she wrote a book called Transformation of America. It's two words, transformation, that made these allegations back in the 90s,

and she had been talking about it earlier than then. And there were previous allegations going back to 1980, even in the late 70s, people making claims like this. And, of course, then if you even go back earlier than that, I mean, also you had things like the McMarden preschool case. I mean, it's not just fringe stuff. The whole satanic panic of the 1980s, this didn't usually involve the leaders of America being involved in this,

at least not in the versions that caught on in the mainstream, but this idea that there were these networks of child molesters and Satanists who were working behind the scenes, to capture children, to molester, and some versions of the story, sacrifice them. You have things like, in a case of the McMarton preschool, alleged secret tunnels underneath them, which, of course, we saw the same sort of thing being claimed in the Pizza Gate story. Now there are some post-Pizagate conspiracy theories about,

I was just reading this morning about a donut shop in Portland where they were claiming there were secret tunnels beneath it. And, in fact, this goes back a long, long time ago, stories like that because in the 19th century, some of the tales people told about convents were very similar in terms of, you know, the abuse of children, secret tunnels underneath, and one that I wrote about after the guy showed up at Comet Pizzeria with a gun back in 2016, I pointed out that in 1834, a guy didn't just show up with a gun. A whole mob showed up and burned down a convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts,

because they were convinced that the people who worked and lived there were, you know, holding the students and young women in sexual slavery and that there were secret tunnels and so on, everything you expect in the Bistaria, right? And there was, and in that case, it was, you even had, I mean, people talk about quote-unquote fake news like it's something new. Well, you had handbills and placards that were written anonymously and being passed around that were making all these claims about what was going on in there. and in fact if you want like an optimistic takeaway from this compare them you know burning down the convent to like one guy showing up with a gun and not managing to hit anything I mean maybe the trend line is in the right direction but yeah there's there's it's not surprising that stories like these this keep coming back because you know it speaks to the same sorts of anxieties

people are always concerned about terrible things being done to children I mean that's something that's just hardwired into us although it manifests in different ways So it shouldn't be surprising that people would tell stories in the 1830s that are similar to stories people are telling in the 2000s. It's interesting to me, though, that it's become so tied up with politics now. Do you see a reason why it's transformed from, you know, convents to, is it just whatever the authority figure is of the day? Well, the convents weren't the authority figure of the day, obviously, because this was in the United States. Yeah, but the church.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, right. Yeah, but the church was feared as outsiders, or at least by the people who went to burn it down. I mean, those were Protestants, not Catholics, who went after the convent. But, yeah, I mean, it's really just a matter of, you know, different stories get combined. I mean, in the case of Q&N, you've got this sort of history of, you know, fear of pitophile conspiracies.

And that's been flaring up recently, you know, in the mainstream, you know, all these concerns about human trafficking. and often reaching into the realm of the sort of dubious and conspiratorial if you look at some of the stuff that gets passed around on Facebook or even gets repeated in the local news. And then you've got these other stories going around about the deep state, and it's kind of natural that people would try to combine them. I mean, am I natural? I mean, that's the sort of cultural evolution you might expect to see. In the case of, I mean, the stuff I was mentioning with Kathy O'Brien and some of the other folks who claimed to have been victims of pedophile around. in the 80s and 90s. That's the earliest I've seen of combining it with fears of government

conspiracies. That doesn't mean it didn't happen before then. I'm not going to make a strong claim like that's the first time it ever happened. But I think there were particular reasons why people would start mixing it then. You would just had a bunch of genuine scandals in the mid-70s coming out of the CIA doing genuine, terrible things in the name, you know, MK Ultra is the one that people point to where they were doing, you know, giving people psychedelic drugs without their consent and things like that. And it was sort of tied up with how do you resist brain, how do we train people to resist brainwashing? Is this something, maybe something that we would be able to do to people as well?

So that stuff comes out. And then that obviously, I mean, naturally gets adapted by people who've got sort of broader conspiracy fears around brainwashing and mind control and things like that. And so once you've got that current going strong at the end of the 1970s, at the same time that you've got this resurgent, and really at the end of the 70s, beginning of the 80s, you've got this intense wave of fears of pedophile rings and missing children conspiracies and things like that just starting to crest. It's not surprising that they would combine then. And so now we've got another moment where you've got the two sets of concerns both cresting at the same time.

And not only can people combine them, but they can look back at this whole literature that's emerged over the past few decades of people who have mixed them in the past. And so that allows it to happen more quickly and constant combination, recombination, evolution. Do you think the Internet has just kind of allowed all of this to happen faster? How has it changed the conspiracy game? I think the Internet has allowed the news cycle in general to work faster, and that includes, I guess what you could call the alternative news. cycle or this is maybe three steps removed alternative, but everybody is writing and transmitting things more quickly. I don't think that the Internet has increased the general volume of conspiracy thinking. I don't think there's strong evidence for that, and to the extent that we have evidence

of like the level of conspiracy thinking in America, if anything, it's probably a little lower now than it's been in the past, although again, that's very hard to measure. But I've seen one study that attempts to, and that's basically what the conclusion it reached. But the internet does mean that a new story can be written more quickly and spread more quickly and then be debunked more quickly and mixed with another story more quickly. Everything happens faster. There might not be more people thinking about conspiracies, but they might come up with more conspiracy theories that morning before breakfast. Kind of another one of the pillars of this is the idea of deep state or a shadow government, kind of separate from the pedophilia accusations, I think.

And this is an idea that predates even the republic itself, right? This goes back to the colonial era. Oh, yeah, sure. I mean, it's, oh, what was the phrase that I quoted Edmund Burke using? I think it was the double government. Two systems of administration were to be formed, one which should be in the real secret and confidence, the other merely ostensible. So, you know, this is literally centuries ago, and the person who's very prominent and influential and intelligent, you know, using that kind of, that same basic idea. And, of course, there's something to it. I mean, it's especially in the context of, you know, the British court. I mean, court intrigue is famous.

There's a reason why that phrase exists. And I'm not trying to make Edmund Burke out to be a nut in his ability to. to think what's going on in public is not always the same that's going on in private. We know that is, in fact, the case. But then you can take it in all sorts of extreme directions. I mean, Burke also, this is moving away from the secret government idea, but it's one thing that I had and didn't fit into the book. Burke was believed that the Bavarian Illuminati was behind the French Revolution

and actually wrote a fan letter to one of the people who wrote a tract to that effect, and I wish I had the letter in front of me. But, I mean, he basically said, yeah, I think you're on to something. I may even know some of the folks who are involved in stuff like this. So he was sort of prone to conspiratorial thinking. But, you know, it was not absurd to think that there's a difference between what's presented in the public and what's going on in private. And, of course, in the 20th and 21st century, the sort of the room for thinking that expands because government gets so much larger. All these new bureaucracies are formed.

secret bureaucracies are formed. In some cases, bureaucracies with secret budgets. You don't know how much is being spent on this intelligence agency. Or, I mean, some people who are briefed on it know, but the general public doesn't. And that lack of transparency, of course, opens the door not just for all kinds of actual misbehavior, but for all kinds of speculation about what misbehavior might be going on. And that makes room for all sorts of theories. Do you see that as kind of the function of this is kind of a folkloric way for people to process not being able to know what's going on in a FISA court?

Well, I don't know if it's, I should say, as specific as the FISA courts, because I don't know how many people who don't follow politics would recognize that phrase. So it's more of a general sense that they don't know everything that's going on in the, well, I mean, let's back up when you say this, are you referring specifically to sort of the deep state conspiracy theories around Donald Trump and so on? I'm talking about conspiracy theories. I'm using that as kind of a segue to get into why is this part of the American landscape in general? Why are conspiracy theories so popular? What function do they serve in our society? I mean, I think in general, if a story catches on,

even if the story doesn't have anything in it that's true, if it catches on, it tells you something true about the anxieties and the experiences of the people who believe it. And so often you have stories that are just, sort of a mythic way of talking about something, something that people have experienced or just something that they're afraid of for whatever reason. And in general, where there, I don't want to suggest that a lack of transparency is essential for a conspiracy theory, because that's not true. It's not as though sunlight would bring all conspiracy theorizing to an end, but I think it is

very much the case that when people don't know what's going on, they're more likely to fill that in with speculations, often dark speculations. And that's not just true of the government. There's a reason why people have, there's this long history of conspiracy theories about what's going on in secret societies, what's going on in churches that, you know, meet in secret. I shouldn't say, churches, I should say religions in general, where people meet in secret. Or just if the fears that people have of outsiders, of foreign cultures are obviously magnified by the fact that they have, they have less direct experience of that culture, especially if it's overseas, but if there's, you know, if say there's been a wave of immigration and there's, you know, an ethnic group that's largely speaking

its own language and their, their, their, their folkways seem mysterious to, you know, the people who, who they're now sharing a country with, all sorts of stuff gets projected onto those folkways and onto that language. And, you know, that's had resulted in all kinds of conspiracy theories and often, you know, very tragic results. So it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, It's in general, it's not just a matter of government transparency, but any time there's just some mystery about what's going on over there, that just opens up all sorts of more room for conspiracy thinking. There's one conspiracy theory that is interesting to me just in this context. You know, Donald Trump brought up the JFK assassination during the 2016 campaign and directly linked 10 crews to the conspiracy theories. So I have a question which is, I mean, this is one of the more studied ones, and there have been so many reports, and there have been so many various theories, of course, that are, you know, still around. I find that it's impossible at this point, having read some of these theories, I have no idea what happened in the Kennedy assassination, even though I guess my tendency is to believe the Warren Commission.

Long story short, do you think that no matter how strange or out there conspiracy theory is that it has an impact on American consciousness? I wouldn't say no matter how strange. I mean, obviously some of them don't have many followers or they have a lot of followers only in this very limited area that's not going to have a big impact. Although I say that sometimes an idea that's unpopular or just kind of obscured. can suddenly zoom into prominence after 10 years in obscurity. Some of the satanic panic ideas of the 80s, they were being touted in places like 2020, were circulating in much more out-of-the-way venues, you know, back in the 1970s.

But it's, and with the JFK assassination, I mean, you know, every death of a president leads to conspiracy theories of some kind or another. I mean, it's just a fact. Every single president who's died in office, hysterifying conspiracy theories. The Kennedy ones have had a staying power thus far that the others haven't. Except Lincoln. I mean, Abraham Lincoln is so central to American history. People will be talking about that as long as the U.S. is around, and if not after longer. John of Kennedy,

it's more interesting, though, because it's, he wasn't present for that long. He didn't have any really big accomplishments. Probably his most notable accomplishment. I mean, he set some things rolling, which range from, you know, the moonshot to the Vietnam War in terms of how good people feel about them. But in his case, it's more about this sort of, on the one hand, this feeling of possibility that was cut short for the people who lived through it, and then the chaos that followed, which I think really got linked in people's head to the death of the president

and this idea that perhaps there could have been a different path. And that whole sort of period from 1963, you know, in about two decades starting there, everything that happened, other assassinations, riots, the war in Vietnam, scandals. You know, there's this notion that we kind of were set on that path in Dealey Plaza on November 22nd, 1963. And I think that that gave it a lot of it, it made people more likely to speculate about a conspiracy

because it just made that assassination seem so central to American history, probably more central to American history than it really was, because I think a lot of that stuff would have happened anyway. I don't think JFK was going to pull us out of Vietnam, for example. I think, you know, Lyndon Johnson's liberal reform, forms probably would not have gone nearly as far if John F. Kennedy were not dead, in fact. So I have a hard time imagining that you'd see things playing out differently in terms of, you know, the ferment and unrest of the 60s and so on. So it's kind of a, the centrality of that assassination

to recent U.S. history is a myth, but that myth just and the effects that all those things had on people's lives kind of, I think, encouraged all that conspiracy speculation. And the question for me is, as the people who are alive then, you know, die off and fade away, will people care as much about the Kennedy assassination? The last few years, the poll numbers have shown how many people believe in it have come down. I mean, it's around half the country right now. It depends on which poll you look at. But in the past, it's been up around 80 percent, at one point, more than 80 percent of Americans saying some sort of conspiracy. was behind Kennedy's death.

And is that going to keep coming down? I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised if it does. Does it ever pay politically for a politician to indulge or play with these kinds of conspiracy theories? Politicians have used conspiracy theories to help themselves for a long time. I mean, in part, I am talking about conspiracy theories that don't get acknowledged, or at least not acknowledged at the time as conspiracy theories. you know, like war propaganda, you know, making claims about what the enemies of the country are allegedly doing that later turns out to be false, but, you know, can help get people behind certain policies and things like that. So in that sense, certainly there are people who have, politicians who have benefited from playing with that sort of story.

But even in moving away from that kind of example, because I tell that to people and they say, oh, that's not what I mean, my conspiracy theory. One politician I'm really fascinated by, especially in the Trump era, was W. Leo Daniel, who was the governor of Texas and then a senator from Texas in the 1930s and 1940s. And he's better known as Pappy O'Don. Daniel. If the name rings Adele, it's probably because they put him in a Cohen Brothers movie and moved him to Mississippi, which was O'Brother, where art thou. But he got elected president, I mean, he got elected governor in a sort of Trumpian way. He was a radio star, and he went around doing these. big rallies and at first the press was ignoring him or sort of poo-poohing his chances, but rallies get bigger and bigger and, you know, gradually he surprises, eventually he surprises everybody and gets elected. And then another way he resembles Trump is that he was, whatever skill he had at campaigning in a non-traditional way, in his case going around with a band on top

of a bus, you know, and things like that, he really hadn't the faintest idea how to pass a legislative agenda and didn't have a very big legislative agenda of his own to begin with. There's some vague ideas about abolishing the poll tax and having big repent or having pensions for senior citizens in Texas. And he, as he had trouble getting stuff through the legislature, in part because he was constantly alienating the people he needed to work with, he went looking for scapegoats. And at one point claimed that he had a list of communist and Nazi sabbatures that it infiltrated the state's factories.

Of course, he wouldn't tell anyone the agent's name, the names of these alleged subversives. He sent a wire to Franklin Roosevelt to tell him he had confidential information about the conspiracy, and he was going to send some of his best man over, you know, to brief them. And the people in the agencies that he was saying had this information, they didn't have an idea what he was talking about. But, you know, he opened up, but he said, anyone out there, anyone in Texas, who's got information about un-American activities, send it in, And all these letters start pouring into the Texas Rangers talking about, you know, conversations people ever heard, weird things they saw, what might be going on.

And the Texas Rangers have to chase down all these tips, which, you know, led pretty much nowhere. And people saying, I mean, literally people saying some Jehovah's Witnesses were coming through. And I think we're up to no good and things like that. In that case, there was a specific letter that claimed that Jehovah was, when they used the word Jehovah, it was like a, code word they were actually meaning Hitler so there was he set off this witch hunt and you know it worked for him he didn't get much passed but he got reelected and the only reason he eventually stopped being governor is because he got elected senator he's one of the few people ever to beat linden johnson in an election and in that case it was partly because some of the local uh industry that couldn't

stand having him as governor thought that getting him out to Washington would be a good way to get them out of their hair and then he arranged some ballot box stuffing um so that's a real conspiracy. So it was, but you know, it worked for him. It worked for his style. And it sort of just a classic case of the way a politician can invoke scapecoats, even in really vague and contradictory ways, and have it to help keep him afloat. We've definitely seen this in other countries, too, right? I mean, it's not just simply America, the most famous case being the Nazis themselves, which came up with the ultimate conspiracy, Jews and Bolsheviks, trying to, take over the world. Well, they didn't come up with that one. But yeah, they really, they really managed to,

yeah. Yeah, I mean, this is done in all sorts of places, of course. And I should say, because some people misread me on this, I say it explicitly in the book, and sometimes people still miss it. I am not claiming that Americans are more paranoid than anyone else on the planet. I wrote this book in order to look at American history through the prism of what have people been afraid of, but I'm sure someone could write a similar book about Russia, about Iran, about China. It's pretty much any culture, and some of those I mentioned are notorious. Actually, I just got a review copy. I haven't read ahead of a book about conspiracy theories in Russia, and I know there's a lot to work with there. And, you know, in general, many people have gotten ahead by scapegoating groups, and one way to scapegoat a group is to spread conspiracy theories about them.

Jesse Walker, thank you so much for coming on War College to talk to us about all of this. Well, thank you. Thanks for listening to this week's show. If you enjoyed it, let the world know by leaving us a review on iTunes. We're told that helps other people to find the show. We're putting transcripts of most of our episodes online at warcollegepodcast.com. And you can still reach us on Twitter. We're at War underscore College and on Facebook, facebook.com slash war college podcast.

We love to hear from you, so hit us up. War College is me, Jason Fields, and Matthew Galt. We will be back next week.