PBS News Hour - Full Show - How conspiracy theories have shaped America

Episode Date: July 16, 2026

From the American Revolution to today, conspiracy theories have been part of the American story in ways that may surprise us. In this episode of Judy Woodruff's "In Pursuit of Happiness," she sits down with Jesse Walker, author of "The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory," to explore how conspiracy theories take shape -- and what they tell us about who we are. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy

For as long as Americans have argued about freedom, we have also had conspiracy theories, whether it was during the Revolutionary War, the founding of our country, all the way to QAnon and everything in between, including the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. I wanted to look back at the role that conspiracy theories have played throughout American life. I'm Judy Woodruff. This is In Pursuit of Happiness. Joining me is Jesse Walker. He's author of the book, The United States of Paranoia, a conspiracy theory. He's also the book's editor of Reason Magazine, a leading libertarian publication. Jesse, welcome. Well, thanks for having me here. So, Jesse, I want to go back to the beginning, but I also want to clarify something.

What's the difference between a conspiracy, a real conspiracy, and a conspiracy theory? Well, it's basically, just like it says on the 10, a conspiracy is an actual group of people gathering together in secret to accomplish something. Usually something bad, although one thing I talk about in the book is the idea of a benevolent conspiracy that's also out there. A conspiracy theory is people imagining what folks might be up to, imagining a conspiracy. Might be rooted in solid suspicions, might be rooted more in fantasy, but it's something that, at the very, very least you don't know if it's true. Now recently sometimes people have started saying conspiracies when they mean conspiracy theories and that leads to I saw one headline that was for an op-ed it was something like conspiracies are a threat to America and they meant conspiracy theories were

a threat to America but it made it sound like the op-ed was going to be pretty paranoid and in some ways it was. So there is a lot of sort of standing out of the difference between the two terms but they are different they are different they are definitely in fact going back to the revolution which is where I want to begin. There were real conspiracies. There were real conspiracies around trying to get rid of George Washington. For that matter, I mean, if you're having a revolution, you're engaged in conspiracy right there. But at the same time, I mean, the Declaration of Independence, everyone remembers the sort of bill of particulars, all the reasons they're revolting. They call it the train of abuses and usurpations. What people often forget, or maybe it just sort of washed over them when they read it in school,

is that the Declaration also calls these abuses a design. And they say the purpose of that design is to bring us under absolute despotism. I mean, the founding fathers were in many cases driven by a conspiratorial vision of what Great Britain was up to. The idea not just that they were taking away Americans' liberty and self-government, but that they were aiming to impose tyranny and maybe ultimately to impose it on England. But are you saying that's what the founders, some of the founders believed that they were going to be enslaved? Yeah, I mean, there's a letter that George Washington wrote where he says actually enslaved like the blacks that we hold with the power over today. I don't remember the exact phrase.

So yeah, and it's Gordon Wood, who just passed away. The great historian of the American Revolution had a great article in the early 1980s where he talked about the sort of approach to evidence in that. And in general, there was an idea that you could infer people's intentions by what they did. So there is a passage in Jefferson, future president, Thomas Jefferson, where he says, you know, this is not a direct quote. This is me paraphrasing. If it was just one encroachment on our freedoms, you know, that could just be an accident. But when it happens again and again through multiple governments, that to me means that there's a plot against us. So who was behind the stirring it up and making it bigger than it was?

I mean, I read a little bit about Samuel Adams and his role and all this. Well, I mean, there's also British conspiracy theories about who was stirring up the Americans. I mean, long before there was an alliance between the American revolutionaries and the French, there were people loyalists who were convinced that there was basically outside agitators from France, who were stirring up the rebellion and no real American actually wanted to revolt. So that also was part of the picture, too. I mean, you've gone so far as to say that conspiracy theories, I mean, starting at the beginning, have become woven into our history, into our lives.

I mean, to some of us, that sounds like a pretty bold declaration. Do you believe that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I write what I believe. And I don't think that's just true of America, by the way. My book is a history of American conspiracy theories, but I think it's all human beings of the capacity. We are a pattern-seeking storytelling creature.

We're always trying to connect the dots to figure out what we can't see, and there's tons we can't see. Do they always, does there always need to be someone who's stirring the pot, or can it just generate just on a thing? Oh, yeah, sure. I mean, rumors naturally generate. I mean, clearly there are times when people deliberately spread conspiracy theories in order to get people upset. But there's also just a matter of, you know, people are naturally suspicious. And especially something bad happens. If there's a war, an assassination, a natural disaster, an epidemic, you're bound to have conspiracy theories just spontaneously generating. Do you, I mean, do you make a distinction between what were the real conspiracies that were taking place and the theories? Oh, sure. We were talking earlier about the founding fathers, and there's sort of fears that there was a sort of plot to bring America, the colonies under absolute despotism.

I don't think any plot like that existed. I think that, you know, the English were improvising the same as anyone else. But at the same time, there really were these restrictions on people's liberties and self-government. There were good reasons for the American Revolution to happen. It's just this is the sort of more apocalyptic version of the story is the one that often gets told in these pamphlets with lots of capital letters and so on. So we asked some of our viewers what was the first conspiracy theory they remember hearing about. William Quintana from California young man, 25 years old.

He said the first one he can remember is 9-11. He said he was always into engineering and people would tell me about the chances of a plane actually going into a building and causing it to break down. He said, I question that. And then Jeremy Myers, who lives in Arkansas, he said my first conspiracy theory

that caught my attention was the Illuminati. The powers that... He said the powers that... He said the powers that may be of it and what is it secure and what does it kind of go into and what does it do supposedly to a group of people. Now this is this completely made up group from Europe, but that's an example of a conspiracy theory that rose in the late 1700s, right? Yeah, and I shouldn't say it was not completely made up.

There was formed in 1776 an organization called the Bavarian Eliminati, May 1st, 1770s. its birthday and the person who founded it, Adam Weissop, was afraid of the influence of the Jesuits and created this order that then became sort of a secret society within a secret society because they joined the Freemasons. And it was suppressed in the 1780s. But there were always rumors that it continued and that it was behind the French Revolution, that it was behind all these other forms of upheaval. And those fears came to America in the late 1790s. Of course, right after the revolution already America is filled with conspiracy theories, the federalists and the Jeffersonians being afraid of what each other are up to. On the Jeffersonian side, you have these fears that

John Adams is going to be made a king, and one of the more extreme versions that he perhaps would be having a marriage, uniting his family with the king of England's family and will back be under English domination again. On the flip side, the federalists were afraid of Jacob and subversion in America, that the Illuminati had come here, that they were influencing Thomas Jefferson, in Jedediah Morse, who was a preacher in the northeast, the father of Samuel Morse, who famous Morse code, fame, and also something a conspiracy theorist. He had a sermon where he not only talked about, you know, the threat of the Illuminati and how they were going to overthrow the government and religion, but he said they were going to bring up the slaves

who just had their successful rebellion in Haiti and have them sweep across the war. the South and burn and loot along the way. So people were full of these suspicions and fears. Even George Washington, people were writing him and saying, you know, you're a Freemason. Are you afraid maybe the Illuminati are controlling the masons in America? And he would write back and say, well, of course, the Illuminati are terrible and their ideas are pernicious. But as far as I can tell, they're not pulling the strings of the lodges here in the United States. Why do you think the Illuminati was such a persistent? I mean, you've educated me. I thought it was completely made up, but you're saying it existed. So what was it that caught on

in people's imagination? It was at a time where there was a lot of both literal rebellion, you know, the French Revolution especially, but also ferment and people challenging, you know, the old thinking around the church and so on, a new age of rationalism and the Enlightenment. They kind of were a way to sort of put a label, at this stage, it's to say, because it's one of those stories that evolved, to say this is an enemy with a name,

that, you know, this is, it's organized, there's some people behind it, and this is the devil, this is the demon we can point to, that it's this group. You do write about five different, I guess, storylines. as we think about conspiracy theories.

Tell us in brief what those are. So the names I give them are the enemy outside, the enemy within, the enemy below, the enemy above, and the benevolent conspiracy. And these are ideal types, and in practice people will sometimes mix and match them. But the basic ideas are the enemy outside. The conspirators are outside the community's gates. They want to come in.

The enemy within is the opposite of the That's where the conspirators, they're in the community, they look like you, they could be anyone. The classic example in American history is the Salem Witch Trials. The sort of classic pop culture example would be invasion of the body snatchers or any of those movies where you don't know who the pod people are, but it could be the person, you know, in the bed next to you, right? The enemy above is that that's what people often think of when they hear the phrase conspiracy theory. The powerful.

Exactly. They're in the government. or big business or maybe a secret society that's secretly controlling the government or big business, all sorts of CIA conspiracy. These are, it's easy to think of what you mean by enemy above. The enemy below is the fear of the lower orders of society conspiring to rise up. Examples like throughout the Antebellum South, people afraid of slave conspiracies to revolt. And you can see some of the same tropes of those stories,

being used again, like in the 1960s, with fears of conspiracies during the riots of the 60s. And then finally, the benevolent conspiracy is the idea of a secret force behind the scenes working to make things better, working to enlighten people, on stories about Rosicrucians, about angels, benevolent aliens. And actually, this sometimes enters the sort of political conspiracy theories, too. A big part of QAnon was the idea not just that there was this vast conspiracy against, against America and humanity and all that is good and decent, but that there's this secret war being fought against them behind closed the doors, behind the scenes, with Donald Trump secretly working together with Robert Mueller to go after, you know, the pedophile rings and so on. Is there one of these kinds of conspiracy theories that you've put into different categories that you think is most dominant right now, or are they all still?

I think a great thing about living in a pluralistic society, as you can find. people afraid of everything at the same time. So they're all alive right now. That's a statement about us, isn't it? Yeah, I think so. So we also, Jesse, we asked our viewers which conspiracy theory looms the largest in American life today. This is William Quintana from California. He says, from Fresno. He said, scapegoating these days is the worst because there's so many problems that are hard to solve in the moment and have so many complex problems surrounding it that it's easier just to point to one person and say they're the problem. And then Mike Miller from Maine says, he says, I'm from Rockland. He said, Project 2025, which as we know was something

that actually did happen, has a number of places in there where they think the future should be a certain way that isn't anything like we've thought since the rebuilding of America after World War II. A lot of it just isn't that way. So he's looking at something that did, that is, that was done. Project 2025, and turning it into and saying there's something nefarious about it. Well, often there's a grain of truth in conspiracy theories. Well, I mean, sometimes a conspiracy is real, period. But even some of the more Utre ones, there will be some sort of basis to it. And the flip side of that is even when there's a real conspiracy, people will extrapolate from it. I mean, Watergate really happened, but there's all sorts of really elaborate and baroque conspiracies.

theories that extend beyond what we know happened in Watergate, for example. So Project 2025, I mean, that's not a conspiracy. It's a document. It was produced by the Heritage Foundation. It's not even so much in a, some of it reads like an agenda. Other parts of it are people debating with each other about what they want to do. But it's a real document, and it's obviously had a real influence on how Trump 2.0 has proceeded. At the same time, sometimes I hear people make claims about it that aren't backed up by what's in there. they're extrapolating beyond what's in the book. Speaking of this, I mean, we know that there are clearly instances throughout our history

where government has lied to us. Yeah, absolutely. We think about what happened during Watergate. We think about the war in Vietnam. We go back to the Tuskegee experiments on black Americans that went on for decades. It's understandable that because of events like these, that some Americans, many Americans, and many Americans would say, I can't trust what government is telling me. Skepticism is a good thing.

I think people need to be aware of how they use that skepticism, like when evidence is credible and when it isn't. And there's a feedback loop between what people learn that's true and then what they're willing to imagine. You mentioned the Tuskegee experiment. For people who don't know, from the 30s through the 70s, the public health service was offering free health care to a group of black American citizens, and as part of that was deliberately leaving syphilis untreated among people who they found had it

in order to study whether it affects blacks and whites differently. Which is astonishing. It's like one of the great crimes of the American government in 20th century. Well, if you know about that, or if you've just suffered high-handed treatment by white doctors, or for that matter, at the same time in many states, up until the late 70s, you still had sterilization laws. And sometimes people would be sterilized, not just against their will, but without being told.

If you know that, and then you hear a rumor, and this was a real rumor, not a real thing that happened, but a real rumor, that Church's chicken was putting ingredients in its food that would have led to the sterilization of black men. That's false, but people find it easier to believe if they know about the other things. It primes them for it. And similarly, you mentioned Watergate.

I mean, in the 70s, you didn't just have the Watergate scandal. You had the Church Committee hearings, the Pike Committee hearings, all these crimes of the CIA, the FBI that came out. And it had a real effect on public opinion. I mean, in 1965, I think it was Gallup, one of the pollsters had how many people hold the FBI in high esteem. And it was something like 84%. of the public. It was 80-something percent. Ten years later, it was 30-something percent. For the CIA, it was even lower because of all the things that had come out. And when you have people then learning about the real crimes that Jay Agar Hoover did or the real complicity of the CIA in various

coups and assassinations, they're more willing to imagine that the CIA was involved with the Kennedy killing or something like that. And that then also gets picked up by Hollywood. You have a wave of conspiracy thrillers in the 70s, some of them great movies. you know, you're more, in which they're more willing to have, you know, the, not just some mysterious group like Spectre, but like an actual government conspiracy against the public. And then when that happens, people have, that gets incorporated into what they're willing to imagine, too. So it's between popular culture and real news and conspiracy folk or they're all influencing each other all the time. How difficult is it? I mean, let me ask it this way, Jesse. Is it more difficult today than it's ever been or easier to tell the difference between what's a truly suspicious activity that's going on and something that's just completely made up? I can't necessarily put myself in the mindset of somebody, you know, 60 years ago. I will say that there's a lot, just as conspiracy theories are,

generated more quickly now. They're debunked more quickly now as well. Just as... Because of better information, better report. Social media, you know, you can go to snopes.com. And there's also the fact that a lot of times when the government lies, they're less likely to get a pass than they were, you know, 60 years ago. I mean, a lot changed because of Watergate in that period. So it's, there's a lot of influences going in different directions. It's, I think, some ways it's easier, in some ways it's harder. So much around, as we've been saying, so much of this is developed around bad, terrible things that happen, assassinations,

assassination attempts, which our country has experienced over the course of our existence. I will say when I was in high school, that was when JFK was assassinated. I remember watching it on television watching Lee Harvey Oswald be shot by Jack Ruby right there in front of you. And then when I was a little bit older

watching whether it was the war in Vietnam, watching that, the stories that would come back around that and what was behind it and whether the government was telling the truth or not. And yet I know that, I mean,

again, on the assassination, that so much, it was almost as if it was an invitation to make something up about, it couldn't have been one person who killed President Kennedy. There had to be other people, and then you had a movie made about it later on. Quite a few movies. Quite a few movies. I'm thinking of one in particular. But these events almost invite conspiracy theories, don't they?

Yeah. And I should say every single presidential assassination, I mean, for that matter, every single presidential death, whether or not we have good reason to think it's an assassination, has inspired conspiracy theories. Usually they get forgotten after a while. It's a people don't remember that there were some folks out there who thought that Jesuit telepaths killed Warren Harding. That was kind of arcane then, but a lot of people believe that Warren Harding's, wife had poisoned him. That's mostly forgotten now. It's interesting that the two that sort of has stayed in the public imagination, one of them is Abraham Lincoln, the other is John F. Kennedy. Now with Lincoln, it's no surprise that it stayed in the public imagination. He's arguably the most important president in American history. It came at a hinge point right at the end

of the war. It may well have changed the course of American history right then. and he's become, for obvious reasons, the sort of great folk figure of American mythology. So even before you get to the fact that John Wilkes Booth did have at least some co-conspirators, you're going to have people still thinking about it. But John F. Kennedy, it's more interesting that that has stayed in the public imagination in ways that the deaths of James Garfield and William McKinley and Warren Harding haven't. It's obviously people were going to think about it in the 60s, in the 70s. But after a while, I mean, Kennedy ultimately, in the grand scheme of things, was a minor president.

He did not accomplish a whole lot. One of the biggest things he did accomplish was sending advisors to Vietnam. And a lot of the conspiracy theories kind of turn to end that on its head and sort of imagine he would have gotten us out of Vietnam. So my sort of pet theory for a long time was because I remember in the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination, 2013, you know, people were asking me my views on the people of public opinion on it. And there's almost always been a majority thinking there's been a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. From the very beginning. There was like a brief moment like right after the Warren Commission came out where a substantial number of Americans were willing to believe. them, but that didn't last long. And the highest number was actually in 1983. There was an ABC poll where it was like around 80%.

They didn't all agree on what the conspiracy was, but they didn't accept the official story. And by 2013, it was coming back down a little. And depending on which poll you looked at, it was in the 60s or even the 50, maybe 52%. And so my theory was, well, the people who lived through this, it was very, it loomed large for them, especially. since there's this period that sort of bookended by Lee Harvey Oswald in one end and John Hinckley on the other and everything goes crazy and you sort of imagine the Kennedy assassination as a time when that could have been either that could have been averted or for the people who are sympathetic to the to the ferment that they would have had an ally in the White House the great progressive hope John F. Kennedy reckoned into being the great progressive hope and that as people were getting older new generations were coming up.

Maybe people weren't, it's not just that the number of people who believed in the conspiracy was coming down, but it was older people had stronger opinions, either that it was or it wasn't. But it's actually gone back up a little bit since then for different reasons. I think a lot of the Trump supporters sort of see echoes of Trump fought the deep state just like JFK. You know, we have RFK Jr. in the government now, so Kennedys are back on the, say, on the off the front back burner of the stove.

So it's interesting, maybe it's going to be something that's like, you know, maybe the sinking of the Titanic isn't all that grand, really important in historical influence, but it's still part of American folklore, the death of Jesse James. Maybe it's going to be one of those things that, no matter how important it was or wasn't historically, it'll always be part of our folklore. I don't know. But it's been interesting watching it stick around and keep going.

We looked at trust in federal government in 1950. 78, 73% of Americans said they trusted the federal government most of the time. By last year, that number was down to 17%. So these events have taken a toll on the public's trust in what government is telling us. I want to, I want to, you touched a moment ago on social media and the digital age. I mean, that's clearly made the spread of conspiracy theory so much easier, hasn't it? They are generated faster. They mix more. And they're also, when they're debunked, they're debunked more quickly.

I mean, just as the new cycle in general has sped up, the sort of alternative news cycle of conspiratorial speculations has sped up in the social media age. That doesn't mean that people are more prone to believing in conspiracy theories now. A lot of times it just means it's more visible. We had a viewer, Julie Sullivan from Tennessee. She actually has a question for you picking up on this. She says, what do you think the public will do next, have an aha moment and become more sophisticated consumers of information

or instead gravitate even more toward false information that appeals to them and away from reality? I don't like making predictions about what the public as a whole is going to do. think that people have a great capacity for skepticism both in good ways and in bad. And a lot of times people who are skeptical towards an official narrative need to learn to be skeptical about what then sort of tickles their own notion of how things are. You've got to be skeptical for your own narratives too. But I don't know that we're going to have a big movement either in either direction that she

mentions, but if we do, I'm certainly not the forecaster who could imagine it. I mean, you've argued that conspiracy theories, yes, they are about events and what people think, but they also tell us a lot about ourselves, about us, and how we think. Yeah, if a conspiracy theory catches on, it tells us something true about the anxieties and the experiences of the people who believe it, even if it says absolutely nothing true about the subjects of the theory themselves. And often sometimes there's some truth, but it gets blown up in weird ways. It becomes a form of folklore. And any kind of people's folklore can tell you something about the culture and the psychology and the experiences of the people who believe it.

We were talking earlier about the, I gave the example earlier about the rumor about church's chicken. You know, that emerged at a particular time in people's lives when sort of secret sterilizations was something to be afraid of, you know, and corporate misbehavior was. something to be afraid of. That was, it just manifested itself as sort of an odd rumor. I remember the editor of the book was really amused by that. I think he grew up eating church's chickens. That one always keeps coming back to me. But this is, this is true of everyone. It's also true of, I mean, another theme of the book is that conspiracy theories aren't just a feature of the fringe. They're present across the political spectrum, including in the center.

if they're not often called conspiracy theories if the president of the United States believes. Maybe nowadays they are, but during the 1980s, when I was in high school, there was a fear of a vast network of satanic cults that was molesting and in some versions of story even sacrificing and killing children. This was taken very seriously by television news. It was taken very seriously by prosecutors and juries. people went to jail in things like the McMartin daycare case, which people now recognize were nonsensical, these claims that were being made. So that was some, you can then look back and say, what does that tell us about the anxieties of the 1980s? That this, people were able to embrace this kind of, nowadays when people talk about that, they say, ah, Q and 9, it's so

bizarre, bizarre, it's a fringe. And the Comet pizza. Yeah, Pizza Gate, yeah. Pizza gate that happened during the 2016. Yeah. election. I want to ask you about education. How much difference does it make in identifying people who are more prone to believe conspiracy theories, if we're even able to do that? Well, educated people are very capable of believing in conspiracy theories. In fact, and sometimes they're much better at rationalizing their beliefs and at seeking out exactly what's going to support their beliefs. I guess one would think if you've studied science or if you've studied science or if you've studied history, you've put together some facts that might make it harder for you to accept some

outlandish, crazy, far out there theory. There's difference also between different kinds of theories because someone might not necessarily believe the most like Baroque and apocalyptic, the Illuminati are going to be saying. That we didn't really land on the moon and the Earth is flat. But people are, although, I mean, some people have managed to rationalize that belief who are very smart in other areas. But at the same time,

I'm like we're recording this shortly after a primary in Los Angeles, and my social media feed is filled with people who are coming up with all sorts of reasons to not believe that their candidate was ejected from the race and is not going into the runoff for legitimate reasons. In this case, it's Republicans who, I believe Spencer Pratt should be in the runoff, but I've seen Democrats do the same thing. And often, as people are very well-educated, who are good at straining for whatever evidence fits their confirmation bias.

This sort of gets to the whole thing about the difference between good and bad skepticism, is you have to think, are, am I thinking through this story skeptically? Am I thinking through something the official is telling me skeptically in terms of what could be wrong with it? or am I just looking to pick out the things that will make it fit what I want to be true? And people are very prone, including very well-educated people, to just picking out the things they want to be true, especially if it's something they're very passionate about, and people get passionate about politics. And in the case of California, the fact that it's taking them days, even weeks,

to count votes, and people are saying, wait a minute, this shouldn't be happening. Lots of people who don't believe there's a conspiracy think that California needs to clean up its act in terms of how quickly they count the votes. So let's move on to the 30,000 foot. It is, our conspiracy theory is more likely in a country with, you know, that believes in freedom, a democracy like the United States, where there is freedom to have different ideas, or in countries, I don't know, China, North Korea,

where you, you know, you're told, what to believe, frankly. I mean, authoritarian countries have a lot of conspiracy theories, both in the sense of people who have learned over the years. He can't believe everything the government says. And also because the government frequently will spread conspiracy theories to justify its position. And so there's, but of course there's lots of conspiracy theories in a free country, too. We're free to believe whatever we want.

It's great, you know. I believe in free speech, free religion, the right to come up with any cockamamies. Amy scheme and set up a little storefront somewhere and run off pamphlets and tell the world. So maybe it's a different style of paranoia sometimes. But it's, I mean, the human ability to tell stories and connect dots is going to be there, both in freer countries and in less free countries. So we are, as we sit here right now, Jesse Walker, we are surrounded by conspiracy theories about what's going on, what President Trump is saying about the 2020 election, which has been,

that it was rigged. There's been no evidence to support that. That's out there. There are other theories about the murder of Charlie Kirk, who was really behind that. But as we, you know, this is our 250th year. We're thinking about our democracy and who we are as American people. Are conspiracy theories just who we are and we're going to live with them forever? I mean, it's part of being a human being. People are going to always have conspiracy theories. And that doesn't mean that there never anything to worry about because sometimes they lead to social scapegoating and violence and bad things.

It does mean that it does make a difference for how we think about it. When the anti-conspiracy theory people fall into the apocalyptic frame of mind and imagine that they're seeing a surge like never before and so on. And they start imagining the desperate measures, censorship, and so on you might do. That's a different framework. I think you need a framework of maintenance. That it's just part of this is people generate these stories. I even, set aside whether conspiratorial or not, people are going to generate false stories.

People are going to have dubious beliefs. And you're going to have to, I mean, if you're a reporter, if you're a good reporter, or if you're a good historian, or if you're, heaven forbid, an honest politician, you know, someone who's trying to actually get some truth out about things, it's going to be a constant act of maintenance and an awareness that this is always going to be happening and an awareness of, you know, what it takes to make the case to people about what is or isn't true. And that was true, you know, 50 years ago. It will be true 50 years from now.

Is there any contradiction with the fact that a democracy is supposed to be based on facts and on what's really happened and people casting votes based on what they know to be true. Yeah, but people are always casting votes for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes facts, sometimes fears, sometimes loyalty. It's always been a messy process. It's, you know, the other ones tend to be much worse processes. So this is the one we have. But I mean, what is the story of American history, if not political history, if not the story of the constant conflicts between and coalitions between people with drastically different views of what's true and what isn't true?

Whether cultural differences, religious differences, it's regional differences, racial differences, it's been constant since before the American Revolution. and it's just part of living together with other people. And, you know, we're never going to have a completely shared reality. There's the reality we all live in, the one we all share by stint of being here on planet Earth. But our mental models are always going to be a patchwork that overlap with other people's, but not completely. And part of is living in a free society is learning to get along with people who see things differently and to make the necessary adjustments when, you know, your version of reality, edges up against theirs.

Well, I think that's a perfect way to sum up a conversation about conspiracy theories and how much a part they are of our American life, especially as we observe our 250. If Jesse Walker, thank you, thank you so much for joining us. We appreciate it. Thank you for having me here. It's been fun.