Takeaways from the AP's look at the role of conspiracy theories in American politics and society

DAVID KLEPPER
Updated Wed, January 31, 2024 

This image provided by the Adventist Digital Library shows part of a Millerite document circulated on Oct. 16, 1844, in the Boston area, with a headline reading, "End of the World, October 22, 1844!!" Before the appointed day, many of William Miller’s followers sold or gave away their possessions, donned white clothing and headed for high land — in some parts of Massachusetts they climbed trees on the highest hills — so as to hasten their reunion with God. 

(Adventist Digital Library via AP)


WASHINGTON (AP) — Conspiracy theories have a long history.

Humans have always speculated about secret motives and plots as a way to understand their world and avoid danger.

These days, however, conspiracy theories and those who believe them seem to be playing an outsize role in politics and culture.

Republican Donald Trump has amplified conspiracy theories about climate change, elections, voting and crime, and has expressed support for the QAnon conspiracy theory. His lies about the 2020 election he lost to Democrat Joe Biden spurred the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, an event that quickly spun off its own conspiracy theories.

On the left, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has exploited conspiracy theories about vaccines to wage his own campaign for the presidency this year.

Conspiracy theories have also proven lucrative for those cashing in on unfounded medical claims, investment proposals or fake news websites.

The Associated Press has examined the history of conspiracy theories in the United States.

Interviews with experts on technology, psychology and politics give insight into why people choose to believe and spread conspiracy theories, and how those beliefs are affecting our mental health, our politics and our society.

A look at some of the biggest takeaways from the investigation:

A LONG HISTORY

Conspiracy theories exposed social tensions long before the American Revolution and the birth of U.S. democracy.

Just as now, early conspiracy theories reflected popular worries of the day. In the years immediately after the American Revolution, rumors and hoaxes circulated about dark plots by the Illuminati and Freemasons, suggesting those secret organizations wanted to control the republic.

Likewise, the conspiracy theories of the modern age often reflect uncertainties about technology, immigration and government overreach. Stories about UFO coverups, microchips in vaccines or the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, being an inside job are examples.

While the specific claims in many of these tales can be debunked, the stories reflect anxieties shared by millions of people.

“We are the stories we tell ourselves,” said John Llewellyn, a professor at Wake Forest University who studies conspiracy theories and why people believe what they believe.

WHY PEOPLE BELIEVE

Humans thirst for information that can help them protect themselves and help them make better decisions for the future. This information, along with personal experiences, upbringing and cultural perspectives, creates a view of the world that helps people understand big events and forces in their lives.

Disasters, elections, wars and even the outcomes of sporting events can shake our perspective, and make us look for explanations. Sometimes that means accepting the facts. But sometimes it can be easier to embrace an alternative explanation.

Conspiracy theories can act as a shortcut to understanding. They fill in the gaps of understanding with speculation that often reflects more about the believer's inner beliefs than the events themselves. Conspiracy theories suggesting vaccinations are being used to implant microchips in people, for instance, reflect concerns about technology, medicine and government power.

With the internet, false claims and conspiracy theories can travel further and faster than ever. Social media algorithms prioritize content that elicits strong emotions, like anger and fear.

FACING THE DEMONS

The AP interviewed dozens of current and former conspiracy theory believers to understand what led them to believe. They consistently said conspiracy theories offered them a sense of power and control in a world that can seem random and chaotic.

“The pieces did not fit,” said Melissa Sell, a conspiracy theorist from Pennsylvania who began doubting the official narrative of history after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut in 2012.

They spoke of growing distrust of democratic institutions and the media, and a gnawing feeling they were being lied to. The world of online conspiracy theories offered answers, and a built-in community of like-minded people.

“I was suicidal before I got into conspiracy theories,” said Antonio Perez, a Hawaii man who became obsessed with Sept. 11 conspiracy theories and QAnon until he decided that they were interfering with his life. But when he first found other online conspiracy theorists, he was ecstatic. “It’s like: My God, I’ve finally found my people!”

TURNING IDEAS INTO ACTION

Polls show nearly half of Americans believe a conspiracy theory and that those beliefs are almost always harmless. But when fringe views interfere with a person's job or relationships, they can lead to social isolation. And when people put their conspiracy theory beliefs into action, it can lead to violence.

In recent years, conspiracy theorists have tried to stop vaccine clinics, they've attacked election officials and they've committed murders that they say were motivated by their beliefs. The Jan. 6 riot is perhaps the most notable example of how conspiracy theories can lead to violence: The thousands of people who stormed the Capitol and fought with police were motivated by Trump's election lies.

Such rapidly spreading disinformation fuels extremist groups and encourages distrust — a particular concern during a year of big elections in the U.S. and other nations. Russia, China, Iran and other U.S. adversaries have worked to amplify conspiracy theories as a way to destabilize democracy further. Artificial intelligence's ability to rapidly create lifelike video and audio only increases the challenge.

“I think the post-truth world may be a lot closer than we’d like to believe,” said A.J. Nash, vice president for intelligence at ZeroFox, a cybersecurity firm that tracks disinformation. “What happens when no one believes anything anymore?”

PROFITING OFF BELIEF

As long as there have been conspiracy theories, people have tried to make a buck off of them. A century or more ago, peddlers went from town to town selling tonics and pills that they said could cure just about any problem. Nowadays, sales take place online. Business is booming.

There are supplements that claim to reverse aging, bogus treatments for COVID-19, T-shirts, investment scams claiming a new financial order is just around the corner.

The AP took a close look at conspiracy theories involving medbeds, which are futuristic-looking devices that believers think can reverse aging and cure a long list of illnesses. According to claims circulating online, the U.S. military is hiding the technology from the public but Trump, if he wins another term as president, will make them available for free. For people desperate to find help with a medical condition, the claims can be too tempting to ignore.

“There have always been hucksters selling medical cures, but I do feel like it’s accelerating,” said Timothy Caulfield, a health policy and law professor at the University of Alberta who studies medical ethics and fraud. “There are some forces driving that: obviously the internet and social media, and distrust of traditional medicine, traditional science. Conspiracy theories are creating and feeding this distrust.”

Grave peril of digital conspiracy theories: 'What happens when no one believes anything anymore?'

DAVID KLEPPER
Wed, January 31, 2024 







WASHINGTON (AP) — Days after Maui's wildfires killed scores of people and destroyed thousands of homes last August, a shocking claim spread with alarming speed on YouTube and TikTok: The blaze on the Hawaiian island was set deliberately, using futuristic energy weapons developed by the U.S. military.

Claims of “evidence” soon emerged: video footage on TikTok showing a beam of blinding white light, too straight to be lightning, zapping a residential neighborhood and sending flames and smoke into the sky. The video was shared many millions of times, amplified by neo-Nazis, anti-government radicals and supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory, and presented as proof that America's leaders had turned on the country's citizens.

“What if Maui was just a practice run?” one woman asked on TikTok. “So that the government can use a direct energy weapon on us?”


The TikTok clip had nothing to do with the Maui fires. It was actually video of an electrical transformer explosion in Chile earlier in the year. But that didn't stop a TikTok user with a habit of posting conspiracy videos from using the clip to sow more fear and doubt. It was just one of severalsimilarvideos and images doctored and passed off as proof that the wildfires were no accident.

Conspiracy theories have a long history in America, but now they can be fanned around the globe in seconds, amplified by social media, further eroding truth with a newfound destructive force.

With the United States and many other nations facing big elections in 2024, , the perils of rapidly spreading disinformation, using ever more sophisticated technology such as artificial intelligence, now also threaten democracy itself — both by fueling extremist groups and by encouraging distrust.

“I think the post-truth world may be a lot closer than we’d like to believe,” said A.J. Nash, vice president for intelligence at ZeroFox, a cybersecurity firm that tracks disinformation. “What happens when no one believes anything anymore?”

Extremists and authoritarians deploy disinformation as potent weapons used to recruit new followers and expand their reach, using fake video and photos to fool their followers.

And even when they fail to convince people, the conspiracy theories embraced by these groups contribute to mounting distrust of authorities and democratic institutions, causing people to reject reliable sources of information while encouraging division and suspicion.

Melissa Sell, a 33-year-old Pennsylvania resident, is among those who has lost faith in the facts.

“If it’s a big news story on the TV, the majority of the time it’s to distract us from something else. Every time you turn around, there’s another news story with another agenda distracting all of us,” she said. Sell thinks the Maui wildfires may have been intentionally set, perhaps to distract the public, perhaps to test a new weapon. “Because the government has been caught in lies before, how do you know?” she said.

Absent meaningful federal regulations governing social media platforms, it's largely left to Big Tech companies to police their own sites, leading to confusing, inconsistent rules and enforcement. Meta, the owner of Instagram and Facebook, says it makes an effort to remove extremist content. Platforms such as X, formerly known as Twitter, as well as Telegram and far-right sites like Gab, allow it to flourish.

Federal election officials and some lawmakers have suggested regulations governing AI, including rules that would require political campaigns to label AI-generated images used in its ads. But those proposals wouldn't affect the ability of extremist groups or foreign governments to use AI to mislead Americans.

Meanwhile, U.S.-based tech platforms have rolled back their efforts to root out misinformation and hate speech, following the lead of Elon Musk, who fired most of the content moderators when he purchased X.

“There's been a big step backward,” said Evan Hansen, the former editor of Wired.com who was Twitter's director of curation before leaving when Musk purchased the platform. “It’s gotten to be a very difficult job for the casual observer to figure out: What do I believe here?”

Hansen said a combination of government regulations, voluntary action by tech titans and public awareness will be needed to combat the coming wave of synthetic media. He noted the Israel-Hamas war has already seen a deluge of fake and altered photos and video. Elections in the U.S. and around the world this year will create similar opportunities for digital mischief.

The disinformation spread by extremist groups and even politicians like former President Donald Trump can create the conditions for violence, by demonizing the other side, targeting democratic institutions and convincing their supporters that they're in an existential struggle against those who don't share their beliefs.

Trump has spread lies about elections, voting and his opponents for years. Building on his specious claims of a deep state that controls the federal government, he has echoed QAnon and other conspiracy theories and encouraged his followers to see their government as an enemy. He even suggested that now-retired Army Gen. Mark Milley, whom Trump himself nominated to be the top U.S. military officer during his administration, was a traitor and deserved execution. Milley said he has had to take security precautions to protect his family.

The list of incidents blamed on extremists motivated by conspiracy theories is growing. The Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, attacks on vaccine clinics, anti-immigrant fervor in Spain; and anti-Muslim hate in India: All were carried out by people who believed conspiracy theories about their opponents and who decided violence was an appropriate response.

Polls and research surveys on conspiracy theories show about half of Americans believe in at least one conspiracy theory, and those views seldom lead to violence or extremism. But for some, these beliefs can lead to social isolation and radicalization, interfering with their relationships, career and finances. For an even smaller subset, they can lead to violence.

The credible data that exists on crimes motivated by conspiracy theories shows a disturbing increase. In 2019, researchers at the University of Maryland’s National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism identified six violent attacks in which perpetrators said their actions were prompted by a conspiracy theory. In 2020, the year of the most recent survey, there were 116.

Laws designed to rein in the power of social media and artificial intelligence to spread disinformation aren't likely to pass before the 2024 election, and even if they are, enforcement will be a challenge, according to AI expert Vince Lynch, CEO of the tech company IV.AI.

“This is happening now, and it's one of the reasons why our society seems so fragmented," Lynch said. “Hopefully there may be AI regulation someday, but we are already through the looking glass. I do think it's already too late.”

To believers, the facts don’t matter.

“You can create the universe you want,” said Danielle Citron, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law who studies online harassment and extremism. “If the truth doesn’t matter, and there is no accountability for these false beliefs, then people will start to act on them.”

Sell, the conspiracy theorist from Pennsylvania, said she began to lose trust in the government and the media shortly after the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, that left 20 students and six educators dead. Sell thought the shooter looked too small and weak to carry out such a bloody act, and the gut-wrenching interviews with stricken loved ones seemed too perfect, almost practiced.

“It seemed scripted,” she said. “The pieces did not fit.”

That idea — that the victims of the rampage were actors hired as part of a plot to push gun control laws — was notably spread by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. The families of Sandy Hook victims sued, and the Infowars host was later ordered to pay nearly $1.5 billion in damages.

Claims that America's elected leaders and media cannot be trusted feature heavily in many conspiracy theories with ties to extremism.

In 2018, a committed conspiracy theorist from Florida mailed pipe bombs to CNN, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and several other top Democrats; the man’s social media feed was littered with posts about child sacrifice and chemtrails — the debunked claim that airplane vapor clouds contain chemicals or biological agents being used to control the population.

In another act of violence tied to QAnon, a California man was charged with using a speargun to kill his two children in 2021. He told an FBI agent that he had been enlightened by QAnon conspiracy theories and had become convinced that his wife “possessed serpent DNA and had passed it on to his children.”

In 2022, a Colorado woman was found guilty of attempting to kidnap her son from foster care after her daughter said she began associating with QAnon supporters. Other adherents have been accused of environmental vandalism, firing paintballs at military reservists, abducting a child in France and even killing a New York City mob boss.

The coronavirus pandemic, with its attendant social isolation, created ideal conditions for new conspiracy theories as the virus spread fear and uncertainty around the globe. Vaccine clinics were attacked, doctors and nurses threatened. 5G communication towers were vandalized and burned as a wild theory spread claiming they were being used to activate microchips hidden in the vaccine. Fears about vaccines led one Wisconsin pharmacist to destroy a batch of the highly sought after immunizations, while bogus claims about supposed COVID-19 treatments and cures led to hospitalizations and death.

Few recent events, however, display the power of conspiracy theories like the Jan. 6 insurrection, when thousands of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, vandalized the offices of Congress and fought with police in an attempt to disrupt the certification of the 2020 election.

More than 1,200 people have been charged with Capitol riot-related crimes. About 900 have pleaded guilty or been convicted after trials. Over 750 have been sentenced, with roughly two-thirds receiving some term of imprisonment, according to data compiled by The Associated Press. Many of those charged said they had bought into Trump’s conspiracy theories about a stolen election.

“We, meaning Trump supporters, were lied to,” wrote Jan. 6 defendant Robert Palmer in a letter to a judge, who later sentenced him to more than five years for attacking police. “They kept spitting out the false narrative about a stolen election and how it was ‘our duty’ to stand up to tyranny.”

Many conspiracy theorists reject any link between their beliefs and violence, saying they're being blamed for the actions of a tiny few. Others insist these incidents never occurred, and that events like the Jan. 6 attack were actually false-flag events concocted by the government and media.

“Lies, lies lies: They're lying to you over and over and over again,” said Steve Girard, a Pennsylvania man who has protested the incarceration of Jan. 6 defendants. He spoke to the AP while waving a large American flag on a busy street in Washington.

While they may have taken on a bigger role in our politics, surveys show that belief in conspiracy theories hasn't changed much over the years, according to Joe Uscinski, a University of Miami professor and an expert on the history of conspiracy theories. He said he believes that while the internet plays a role in spreading conspiracy theories, most of the blame lies with the politicians who exploit believers.

“Who was the bigger spreader of COVID misinformation: some guy with four followers on Twitter or the president of the United States? The problem is our politicians,” Uscinski said. “Jan. 6 happened, and people said: ‘Oh, this is Facebook’s fault.’ No, the president of the United States told his followers to be at this place, at this time and to fight like hell.”

Governments in Russia, China, Iran and elsewhere have also pushed extremist content on social media as part of their efforts to destabilize Western democracy. Russia has amplified numerous anti-U.S. conspiracy theories, including ones claiming the U.S. runs secret germ warfare labs and created HIV as a bioweapon, as well as conspiracy theories accusing Ukraine of being a Nazi state.

China has helped spread claims that the U.S. created COVID-19 as a bioweapon.

Tom Fishman, the CEO at the nonprofit Starts With Us, said that Americans can take steps to defend the social fabric by turning off their computer and meeting the people they disagree with. He said Americans must remember what ties them together.

“We can look at the window and see foreshadowing of what could happen if we don’t: threats to a functioning democracy, threats of violence against elected leaders,” he said. “We have a civic duty to get this right.”

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From George Washington to Donald Trump, America’s obsession with secret societies is a mainstay of our democracy — and it resurfaces whenever there’s a renewed push for civil rights, author of new book finds

In the last decade, American conspiracy theories about secret cabals working behind-the-scenes to control the world have grown ever more central to political conversations, with supporters in the highest offices in the land. From the Freemasons to the Illuminati, theories about power — and who wields it — are influencing our elected officials, shaping society, and prompting extreme believers to take violent action. 

But belief in world-dominating secret societies is nothing new — and it is woven into the very fabric of our democracy. As far back as the founding of the country, Americans have been obsessed with the idea of secret groups conspiring to pervert the will of the people and the rule of law.

Author Colin Dickey in his new book charts the history of America through its paranoias around secret societies, examining the powerful hold these theories have on the country.

This Q&A is based on a conversation with Dickey, author of the book “Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy,” which will be released July 11. It has been edited for length and clarity. 

It feels like discussion of secret societies and conspiracies has been increasing recently; did you find that true in your research, or is it just a sense as more prevalent figures mention conspiracy theories?

I think for a lot of people, Trump seems singular as a President of the United States who sort of openly espoused conspiracy theories — that’s what I thought when I first dived in — but the more that I did the research, you find this is actually a mainstay in American culture and American politics. George Washington and Abraham Lincoln both openly espoused conspiracy theories of various kinds. Even Hillary Clinton argued, at least publicly, that the government was hiding secrets about aliens. So this is actually a thing that is, I found, constant. 

Can you describe the lifecycle of these conspiracy theories or this kind of belief in the secret society — when do these beliefs peak for us, socially?

These things are sort of omnipresent, but they tend to kind of flare at certain key moments. You find, again and again, almost on a generational level, these moral panics usually revolve around this idea of a secret group who is pulling the strings from behind the scenes. And those erupt as a response to a certain set of other social forces that develop and breed this kind of this reaction.

And can you describe some of those social forces that this conspiratorial mindset has historically or is currently responding to?

While I think all of us are prone to conspiratorial beliefs sort of across the political spectrum, this particular articulation of this idea of a secret group tends to be a thing that is pushed by the right wing in moments when social change seems to be moving at a pace that some people find uncomfortable. A good historical example of what I mean is during the Civil Rights Movement when white racist southerners began to allege that behind the civil rights movement was a sort of secret group of Jews who were pulling the strings. The idea that Black Americans in the South would not want, of their own accord, equality and justice — that they would only be doing this as a result of Bolshevik agitators from the North who were all Jewish.

Are we in one of those moments now?

I think where we’re at now, we’re seeing social changes that are happening both in terms of race and sexuality and gender, in ways that is discomforting for some people. One of the ways how that discomfort gets expressed is through these kinds of conspiracy theories: that maybe this stuff isn’t a natural evolution of people wanting their independence, and liberty, and freedom. Maybe it’s the work of some sort of group behind-the-scenes and, thus, you get the kind of absurd articulations of Pizza Gate and the secret network of pedophiles who are wrecking America.

People who staunchly believe in a powerful network of pedophiles point to high-profile cases like Jeffrey Epstein and his political ties to prove their point. What are your thoughts on the ability to point to significant social events like that and seeing that, in the conspiratorial mindset, as proof of the conspiracy?

One of the sort of “great” things about the conspiratorial mindset is that it is both unclassifiable and it is all-encompassing. It was important for me early on to make a distinction between actual conspiracies and conspiracy theories. There are a number of really classic actual conspiracies: Watergate, Iran-Contra, the Catholic Church abuse scandal. And those tend to be a specific cover-up around specific things, there’s an identifiable group of actors and once you start doing basic journalism, these things tend to unravel pretty quickly.

A conspiracy theory, on the other hand, is designed from the outset in such a way to be both impervious to countervailing evidence and also ever-expanding. For example, one of the weirdest things about antisemitism is that it simultaneously takes the form that all Jews are radical communist socialists who are out to undermine capitalism and simultaneously, they are themselves rapacious capitalists and bankers who are accumulating  as much wealth as possible. The reason why antisemitism is so pernicious and so, so difficult to stamp out is, in part, because it can do whatever the believer wants it to do. And that’s true of many conspiracy theories.

You mentioned Pizza Gate earlier. In your observation, is that a natural escalation of having this belief that a secret society exists and needing to take action to stop it?

The Pizza Gate incident to me represents one of the most extreme versions of what’s happening here, but I think, unfortunately, what has shifted right now, is that kind of violent tendency has moved to an open level of confrontation and intimidation that is currently being directed towards the trans community and drag performances and the LGBTQ+ community as well as continuing antisemitic attacks against synagogues. Right now, I think we’re at a very disturbing and dangerous time when that desire to quote-unquote “help people” has just become a shield to enact these kinds of threatening, intimidating, and violent acts against marginalized groups that are perfectly peaceful and harmless but are being attacked in these sort of violent and disturbing ways.

Nobody has a crystal ball, but where do you see this kind of mindset pushing us socially at this moment? You mentioned it’s a dangerous kind of a scary moment, but are you hopeful about it? Do you have predictions?

I wouldn’t say that I’m super hopeful about it. When I did the research, these moral panics tend to happen historically pretty regularly, you know, every generation. I think one of two things happen, broadly speaking: either more panics will involve the courts and successfully use the courts — a very famous and obvious example of that is the Salem Witch Trials, and more recently, the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. So, you do see these examples where the court system gets used against people, and, in the case of Salem, people were executed. In the case of the Satanic Panic, people were sentenced to decades in prison. Many of them served years in prison before they were finally exonerated.

But that doesn’t always happen and sometimes the courts are not receptive to these charges. And that’s, unfortunately, when you tend to see the most likely probability of mob violence of various forms. And I think that’s what we’re seeing. For example, thinking of Trump’s “lock her up” chant when there was this idea that we would use the courts to go after our political enemies. And it turned out that the American judicial system withstood that, and what it resulted with instead was the January 6th insurrection and other sorts of increasingly lawless acts of violence. So I think that’s, unfortunately, where we’re heading.

Is this something that we’re doomed to repeat?

I try not to be a pessimistic person. I don’t think we’re doomed to this. But I do think that it is a constant seduction, just based on the way that democracy works and something that I think we are morally and ethically and civilly obligated to be constantly aware of — as a very expected pitfall rather than something that belongs only to the radical fringe that we don’t need to worry too much.

What are the consequences of falling into that pitfall? What are the stakes?

When I did the research, I didn’t know exactly what I would find. But I did find, again and again, that these panics — not entirely, but almost always — are coming from the right, and they are being used to slow down, stifle, or reverse changes in the American identity that usually involve greater diversity, and greater economic freedom, greater freedoms for women.

So I think the danger of this pitfall is a society that will ultimately be less free, will take far, far longer for individuals who deserve the same rights as anybody else in this country to realize those those rights and freedoms and be able to live the life they lead. I think we owe it to our fellow Americans to be vigilant about how conspiracy theories formulate, because, almost always, the net effect is harm to the Americans and those in our country who have the least rights and freedoms and a benefit to those who have the most.

The post From George Washington to Donald Trump, America’s obsession with secret societies is a mainstay of our democracy — and it resurfaces whenever there’s a renewed push for civil rights, author of new book finds appeared first on Business Insider.

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An Illuminati Conspiracy Theory Captured American Imaginations in the Nation’s Earliest Days—And Offers a Lesson for Now

John Fea,
Time•September 24, 2020

  

Timothy Dwight circa 1795: Reverend Timothy Dwight IV (1752 - 1817) Credit - Getty Images

In the final weeks before the 2020 election, the outsize role of conspiracy theories in American politics has become unmistakable. For some Trump supporters in particular, campaign-season news is filtered through the powerful idea that hidden forces are at work, that the “deep state”—a supposed secret, shadowy and sinister group of leftist politicians, government bureaucrats, Chinese scientists, journalists, academics and intellectuals—is seeking to destroy American values. Seen through that lens, COVID-19, which has killed nearly 200,000 Americans, is a “hoax”; some even believe that Anthony Fauci is a “deep state doctor.”

But while the particulars of these theories may be new, the dynamics are not. In fact, they go all the way back to America’s earliest years: In the late 1790s, Jedidiah Morse, the congregational minister in Charlestown, Mass., and a well-known author of geography textbooks, drew national attention by suggesting that a secret organization called the Bavarian Illuminati was at work “to root out and abolish Christianity, and overturn all civil government.” Today, such an idea sounds both eerily familiar and like a relic of a less sophisticated time—but the lessons of that episode are decidedly relevant.

With the ratification of the Constitution fresh in the minds of most Americans, and upheaval ongoing across the Atlantic in the form of the French Revolution, the late 18th century was a volatile time. In that environment, Morse became convinced that this group of atheists and infidels were behind the secular Jacobin movement in France that sought to purge the nation of organized religion. He believed that the Illuminati group was pursuing the same clandestine agenda in America and was working closely with Thomas Jefferson-led Democratic Republicans, the Federalists’ political rivals, to pull it off.-

Morse, a Federalist himself, read about the Bavarian Illuminati in books published by European religious skeptics, which described a network of secret lodges scattered across the continent. In a 1798 fast day sermon, he appealed to the worst fears of those evangelicals who remained concerned with the moral character of the new republic. He described the Illuminati’s ominous attempts to “abjure Christianity, justify suicide (by declaring death an eternal sleep), advocate sensual pleasures agreeable to Epicurean philosophy…decry marriage, and advocate a promiscuous intercourse among the sexes.”

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The presence of the Illuminati in America, Morse believed, should cause Christians to “tremble for the safety of our political, as well as our religious ark.” In another sermon on the subject, Morse printed a list of secret societies and Illuminati members currently working their sinister schemes in his Christian nation.

Soon Timothy Dwight, the president of Yale College in New Haven, Conn., expressed similar fears about the Illuminati and used his pen to sound the alarm. In a Fourth of July discourse entitled The Duty of Americans, at the Present Crisis, Dwight quoted from Revelation 16 to caution his listeners and eventual readers about “unclean teachers” who were educating innocent people in “unclean doctrines.” Such teachers were spreading throughout the world to “unite mankind against God.” As they performed their malicious work, the Bavarian Illuminati took cues from previous opponents of Protestant America–the Jesuits, Voltaire and the Masons, to name a few.

Dwight called Americans back to God. This, he believed, was the only effective way of resisting such subversive threats to social virtue. “Where religion prevails,” he wrote, “Illuminatism cannot make disciples, a French directory cannot govern, a nation cannot be made slaves, nor villains, nor atheists, nor beasts.” Dwight reminded his readers that if this dangerous society succeeded in its plans, the children of evangelicals would be forced to read the work of deists or become “concubines” of a society that treated “chastity” as a “prejudice,” adultery as virtue, and marriage as a “farce.”

By the turn of the 19th century, theories about the Illuminati had traveled up and down the Eastern Seaboard and as far as the Caribbean islands. Elias Boudinot, a former president of the Continental Congress, and John Jay, a Federalist statesman, also bought into this conspiracy theory.

Critics of these evangelical Federalists argued that Morse and Dwight, both clergymen, spent too much time dabbling in politics instead of tending to the souls of the Christians under their spiritual care. Others accused these conspiracy theorists of having “overheated imaginations”—and it soon became clear that, while the political forces at work in the 18th century U.S. were very real, this last group of critics was simply correct. There were no Illuminati forces at work in American politics. The conspiracy theory spread by these respected men was just that.

Eventually, Morse’s accusations against Democratic-Republican societies were unable to withstand the weight of evidence and he stopped talking about the Illuminati. As historian Jonathan Den Hartog has written, evangelical Federalists concerned about the preservation of a Christian nation “overplayed their hand” by propagating the Illuminati scare. In the process, they “called their standing as societal authorities into question, and ultimately weakened their position” as shapers of American culture. Within two decades the Federalist Party had faded from the political landscape, but their fears about the collapse of evangelical culture in the United States would persist well into the 21st century.

Today, many evangelical Christians, living with anxiety about perceived threats to what they believe to be the decline of a Christian nation, have turned toward conspiracy theories. Whether it is a “deep state” working secretly with the intelligence community to weaken the Trump administration, an Internet prophet called “Q” or demonic forces seeking to thwart God’s plan for America, we have seen this all before.

In 1790, truth, evidence and reason prevailed, but not before evangelical leaders embarrassed themselves and tarnished their Gospel witness. The comparisons with 2020 are not perfect. No historical analogies are. But sometimes, as we like to say, history rhymes.


John Fea is Distinguished Professor of American History at Messiah University and author of Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump.

SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2007/03/origin-of-american-conspiracy-theories.html

Why are Americans so enraptured by conspiracy theories?

Rod Graham
June 02, 2022


In a June 2021 episode of On the Media, host Brooke Gladstone described a common debate in media circles over conspiracy theories.

Don't put those liars on the air!
I hear you, but sometimes I have to tell people what's going on!
You're spreading their propaganda for them!
It's already spread and having real-world effects!
Well, it wouldn't spread if you denied them a platform!
Gatekeepers don't have that kind of power anymore!
They might if they worked together!
That just drives it underground and it gets even worse!

The conspiracy du jour was election denial. Do you engage with election deniers, platforming and potentially legitimating them? Or do you ignore them at risk of having them spread with no critique?

In that episode, Gladstone spoke with Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at New York University and media critic.

Rosen suggested possible ways out of the puzzle.

One was to report disinformation within a truth sandwich:
When you feel you have to report on a falsehood, you should start with a true statement, sandwich the misleading one in the middle and end with a true statement.

A second was to shift reporting from national to local politics:
The more politics is rooted in problem-solving that people can see in their lives, the less likely this dueling realities universe is to take over.

I started this piece with the intent of describing how much the right-wing has been hijacked by conspiracy theories. I intended to suggest my own ways forward. But the story of conspiracy theories in the US turns out to be more complex. And more troubling.

The contours of conspiracism

Conspiracy theories are dangerous not simply because people believe them. Nor are all conspiracy theories equal. People who believe the Apollo moon landing was faked are not a societal concern. It's when those false claims power troubling behaviors that we worry.

Unlike moon landing conspiracies, election denial forms the justification for overturning legitimate free elections. It can turn a representative democracy into a fascist regime. That was the goal of the J6 insurrection, all powered by a conspiracy theory.

The American public is now learning about “replacement theory,” which is the idea that migrants and nonwhite people are systematically replacing white people. According to a recent Yahoo News/You Gov poll, about 60 percent of Trump voters believe this theory.

We don't have to think that hard to imagine the consequences of accepting this false statement as a true statement. It will lead to xenophobia and mistreatment of migrants, especially nonwhite ones.

Let's not forget about QAnon, a conspiracy theory that ran a close second to election denial since 2020. QAnoners believe, among other things, that an evil cult has taken over the world. They mistrust governments, institutions and elites. They are more likely to believe information not coming from people associated with those entities.

In February, the Public Religion Research Institute said it found that, “Across 2021, 16 percent of Americans were QAnon believers, 48 percent were QAnon doubters, and 34 percent were rejecters."

Wait, wut?

Sixteen percent is one in six people!

And only half of the country doubts QAnon?

This is significant. It suggests this may be a society-wide problem, not only clustered among Republicans. PPRI said Black and brown people were more likely to be QAnon believers than white Americans.

It’s still true that QAnon believers are primarily white (around 60 percent of total QAnon believers), and the largest share is Republican (about 43 percent). But there is more diversity here than I realized.

More research out of the University of Chicago, about conspiracies and immigration, also shows how widespread conspiracy beliefs are. Based on answers to a questionnaire, researchers sorted respondents into two categories: "high conspiratorial thinkers" and "low conspiratorial thinkers." I like this because it’s not tied to any specific conspiracy but instead taps into the predisposition to believe them.

As expected, 45 percent of all high conspiratorial thinkers were Republicans. But a sizeable 36 percent were Democrats.

Similarly, we would expect less-educated Americans to be high conspiratorial thinkers, the logic being these folks have less information literacy or have had less exposure to established facts.

Indeed, 66 percent of “high conspiratorial thinkers” are did not go to college. But that leaves 34 percent of the same who did go to college.

To say we’re a nation of conspiratorial thinkers is no overstatement.

A slightly different question

So what is the solution?

First, I don't think Rosen's suggestions are helpful. It’s all well and good to create a truth sandwich, but when conspiracy theories have as a component that elites are controlling the population, having an elite telling them they are wrong about their ideas is a non-starter.

Covering local issues, where reality is shared, doesn't seem that effective either, mainly because everyday reality simply isn't shared.

People died in Buffalo because one person had a reality in his mind that he and other white people were being replaced. Queer kids are being erased through teacher gag orders in Florida, premised on the QAnon-reality that elite educators want to groom children.

I don't have a solution.

But let me suggest that because so many people in this country across class, race and political lines believe in conspiracy theories, we have been asking the wrong question (myself included).

We have been asking why MAGA types are so invested in conspiracy theories. This question inevitably leads to answers involving racism, Christian nationalism, xenophobia and possibly lack of education.

These answers are only partially correct.

The question goes only halfway.

A full question would ask why we are a nation of conspiratorial thinkers? Once we answer that, we can address the problem.

Rod Graham is a sociologist. A professor at Virginia's Old Dominion University, he researches and teaches courses in the areas of cyber-crime and racial inequality. His work can be found at roderickgraham.com. Follow him @roderickgraham

SEE 

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: The Origin of American Conspiracy Theories 

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for CONSPIRACY

Why the Founding Generation Fell So Hard for the Illuminati Story

They looked at France and said: “Make it make sense.”

BY JORDAN E. TAYLOR

OCT 24, 2022

Photo illustration by Slate. Images by Samuel Finley Breese Morse/Yale University Art Gallery and Getty Images Plus.

Jedidiah Morse looked out over the crowded pews full of his parishioners at the New North Church in Boston. The sight of his crop of long gray hair and his severe face, creased with judgment, probably led some of his flock to flinch at the scolding they expected to receive. His stern persona was so familiar, in fact, that he had earned the nickname “Granny Morse.”

Growing conflict between the United States and France had led President John Adams to proclaim that the day, May 9, 1798, should be set aside for “Solemn Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer.” But Morse’s audience was not due for a lecture that morning. Instead, as he hesitated before launching into his sermon, he must have taken some private pleasure in knowing he was about to shatter their world. Perhaps he even disturbed the furrows of his face with a smile.

In that day’s speech, Morse unspooled a bizarre conspiracy theory alleging that a shadowy cabal of villains called the “Illuminati,” an offshoot of the Freemasons, were aiming to destroy everything that Americans held dear. This group of philosopher zealots, according to Morse, had “secretly extended its branches through a great part of Europe, and even into America.” Their goal was to abolish Christianity, private property, and nearly every foundation of good order around the world. According to Morse, they opposed marriage, encouraged people to explore all kinds of “sensual pleasures,” and proposed a “promiscuous intercourse among the sexes.” Just a few masks short of a Stanley Kubrick film, Morse’s story of the Illuminati played upon the darkest nightmares of the nation’s many devout Christians.

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Morse told his congregation that the Illuminati hoped to infect the people of America through a kind of cultural warfare. They were spreading their doctrines by worming their way in among “reading and debating societies, the reviewers, journalists or editors of newspapers and other periodical publications, the booksellers and post-masters” and infiltrating all “literary, civil and religious institutions.” The most prominent Illuminatus named by Morse was Thomas Paine, whose radical pamphlet The Age of Reason (published in installments in 1794, 1795, and 1807) had caused a political stir in the United States.

If the Illuminati were beginning to corrupt the United States, according to Morse, they had gone much further already in Europe. The evil society’s greatest triumph to date, Morse wrote, was its recent work to hatch the French Revolution and disguise it as a mild, moderate event following the model of the American Revolution. With France’s increasing radicalism, anticlericalism, and disorder, it seemed obvious to Morse that the French Jacobins, the political faction that seized control of the nation in 1792, were simply Illuminati by another name.

Morse got most of this story from a book written by a Scottish academic named John Robison, who in turn took many of his ideas from the abbé de Barruel, a French priest. Robison’s book provided rich source material for Morse’s imagination. It was full of dramatic details, such as an account of the Illuminati possessing “tea for procuring abortion” as well as a mysterious “composition which blinds or kills when spurted in the face.” The Illuminati, according to Robison, defended suicide and discouraged patriotism and property owning. Claiming to worship human reason above all else, they practiced a blinkered ethics in which the means always justified the ends, as long as those ends were the growing power of the organization.

These accounts of the Illuminati were, of course, utterly false. Though a group of Enlightenment intellectuals led by Adam Weishaupt, calling themselves the Illuminati, had existed briefly in Bavaria in the 1770s, they were defunct by the 1790s. They endorsed tolerance and rationalism, but not the kind of extreme amoral worldview attributed to them. There is no evidence that the Illuminati ever held anywhere near the power that its critics claimed. There is certainly nothing to suggest that the reach of the Illuminati extended across the Atlantic to the United States. Nevertheless, in the months following Morse’s dramatic speech, the Illuminati conspiracy theory became an immediate sensation in the United States and Canada.

This was not a fringe conspiracy theory championed by uneducated outsiders. Quite the opposite: Many of the nation’s leading figures put their reputations behind it—both in public and in private correspondence. In one private letter, former President George Washington wrote that he was “satisfied” that the Illuminati had spread their “Doctrines” to the United States. First lady Abigail Adams read Robison’s book and recommended it to friends. New England’s preachers were among the most consistent promoters of the Illuminati conspiracy theory, both from their pulpits and behind closed doors, at a time when religious leaders commanded the respect of large audiences. So why did these well-informed, well-educated individuals fall for it?

The most important reason that the Illuminati theory became popular, as I show in my new book, Misinformation Nation, was that it explained the otherwise inexplicable matter of why the French Revolution had spiraled out of control. The early stages of the revolution in France had thrilled Americans. It seemed that the French, their recent wartime allies who had helped them to secure independence, were following in their footsteps. Until 1798, most Americans remained hopeful that the French Revolution would follow the model of the American Revolution. Even news of guillotines, massacres, and growing public hostility to religion did not deter the most hopeful Francophiles, who dismissed such accounts as exaggerations by British propagandists.

Jedidiah Morse had, earlier in the decade, distinguished himself as an apologist for the violent excesses in revolutionary France. In 1793, as violence erupted in France, Morse explained to his parishioners that despite the nation’s “errors and irregularities,” which were similar to the excesses of the American Revolution, the French Revolution’s cause was “unquestionably good.” Even as his peers started to question the wisdom of the French Revolution, Morse held fast. In 1796, he complained that “very few of the clergy in the circle of my acquaintance seem disposed to pray for the success of the French.” In 1797, a skeptical Noah Webster wrote to Morse, “Your good opinion of the French is very flattering.”

But in early 1798, this all changed. Americans’ hopes that the French Revolution would follow their model began to deflate. French vessels attacked American ships crossing the Atlantic to prevent them from supplying their wartime enemies. When President John Adams sent a delegation to Paris to resolve this problem, the French appeared to insult the delegation and demand a bribe. The dispatches from Paris documenting this dispute, which became known as the XYZ Affair, were published in Philadelphia in April 1798.

This news caused Americans to turn swiftly and furiously against France and its revolutionary politics. Anti-French hatred became the order of the day. But there was a problem. If the French Revolution had birthed an evil nation, as it now seemed, why did Americans celebrate this horrible revolution for so long?

Morse happened to be traveling through Philadelphia in April as the XYZ dispatches became public. That month also happened to be the moment when John Robison’s book about the Illuminati was first published, also in Philadelphia. Here at once was Morse’s undoing and his salvation. Just as the French Revolution was becoming indefensible, the revelation of the Illuminati conspiracy offered Morse a convenient explanation for why he had remained one of France’s most steadfast defenders.

Historians now usually interpret the French Revolution in terms of actions and reactions, theses and antitheses. It wasn’t controlled by any single group but took shape through competition between many opposing individuals: Napoleon defeated the Directory, which displaced the Jacobins, who succeeded the Girondins, and none of them quite agreed on what France was and what it could be. Properly told, it’s an intricate, unpredictable story full of mistakes and confusion, but no evil geniuses.

If the Illuminati had plotted the revolution from the beginning, though, there was quite a simple explanation for its decay: These daring deceivers had pretended all along that the French Revolution was something that it was not. They had managed to convince millions that France was pursuing the path laid out by the American Revolution, even as they plotted out a contrary course of violence, extremism, and atheism. Nothing had changed. The revolution’s evils had simply been unmasked. This version of the French Revolution, centered around the lies of the Illuminati, absolved Morse and his allies of misjudgment. Morse had not erred—he had been deceived. As one sympathetic commentator wrote, Robison’s account “unravels everything that appears mysterious in the progress of the French Revolution.”

By late 1799, some skeptics began to pick apart the Illuminati conspiracy theory. Forced to defend his views in public newspapers and in private correspondence, Morse’s story crumbled. As he received correspondence from European intellectuals who cast doubt on the Illuminati story, Morse began to fall silent. Though he never admitted it, perhaps he realized that he had been deceived. Without fresh evidence to sustain it, the Illuminati scare faded away nearly as quickly as it had arrived.

But the basic outlines of the Illuminati conspiracy theory proved too irresistible to disappear entirely. In the 19th century, many Americans developed a renewed fear of Freemasonry and all sorts of secret societies, even forming the Anti-Masonic Party in the 1820s. In the mid-19th century, some Americans and Europeans began to embrace antisemitic conspiracy theories claiming that a small group of Jewish bankers, especially the Rothschild family, secretly ran the world. In more recent years, conspiracy theorists have grasped onto similar stories about other all-powerful secret societies, such as the “New World Order,” the Bilderberg Group, Bohemian Grove, and QAnon’s “cabal.” Some have returned to the Illuminati, imagining celebrities such as Beyoncé and Jay-Z to be members of this satanic cult.

The names and characters change over time, but the basic template has remained remarkably durable over the centuries: A small, yet nearly omnipotent, group of amoral globalist elites secretly directs world events. This paranoid vision has persevered in large part because it helps their believers to make sense of a rapidly changing world. The faceless structural forces remaking our present—such as globalization, accelerating inequality, deindustrialization, racial justice movements, and cultural fragmentation—require explanation.

Just as the Illuminati explained the otherwise inexplicable course of the French Revolution in 1798, these conspiracy theories allow their believers to explain the apparent decay of American society as the will of evil elites, rather than the unintended consequences of a complex mix of historical forces. At the core of every conspiracy theory is the observation that only bad intentions can produce bad outcomes. There are no accidents, only evil people.

Misinformation Nation: Foreign News and the Politics of Truth in Revolutionary America
By Jordan E. Taylor. Johns Hopkins University Press.
$46 from Bookshop.org
$40 from Amazon

SEE

 LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: The Origin of American Conspiracy Theories 

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for CONSPIRACY