Conspiracy theories: a great American tradition

Americans love to believe completely nutty things, just as long as they require the implicit premise that political enemies are corrupt and evil

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Infowars host Alex Jones dresses as a gay frog for Halloween. Picture: Infowars
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Democrats are about to take control of the White House again, which means that we are undergoing yet another Great Reversal in American politics: the press will revert to being Deeply Concerned about conspiracy theories in American politics, after a four-year stint of instigating many of those conspiracies.
The angst this time is over a new NPR poll whose results were released Wednesday.
‘A significant number of Americans believe misinformation about the origins of the coronavirus and the recent presidential election, as well as conspiracy theories like QAnon,’ NPR ominously intones. ‘The poll results add to mounting…

Democrats are about to take control of the White House again, which means that we are undergoing yet another Great Reversal in American politics: the press will revert to being Deeply Concerned about conspiracy theories in American politics, after a four-year stint of instigating many of those conspiracies.

The angst this time is over a new NPR poll whose results were released Wednesday.

‘A significant number of Americans believe misinformation about the origins of the coronavirus and the recent presidential election, as well as conspiracy theories like QAnon,’ NPR ominously intones. ‘The poll results add to mounting evidence that misinformation is gaining a foothold in American society and that conspiracy theories are going mainstream.’

Gaining a foothold? Has NPR been in a collective coma since it was founded in 1970? That would at least explain its programming choices. But come now: believing in fringe conspiracies as a form of political wish-fulfillment is a venerable American tradition.

In 2000, 31 percent of Democrats believed that George W. Bush stole the election, with an additional 49 percent only conceding that he won ‘on a technicality’. In 2006, a book co-written by a University of Pennsylvania faculty member cited exit poll data to argue that the 2004 election was stolen. Democratic congressman John Conyers supplied the book’s introduction. Even in 2016, when George W. Bush’s rehabilitation as the good Republican who supported perpetual Middle Eastern war was well underway, 46 percent of Democrats were still willing to say that Bush may have known about the 9/11 attacks in advance.

Of course, Republicans were also enjoying conspiracy theories well before the President himself became a fan in 2020. In 2012, 36 percent of Republicans told Farleigh Dickinson University that they believed Barack Obama stole his win in 2012; 64 percent thought that Barack Obama was hiding information about where he was born.

And finally, of course, there’s the four years the press itself spent pumping Russia hysteria up into the thermosphere. Sure, today Congressional Democrats, major newspapers, and disgraced FBI officials may insist that when they fretted over Russia ‘hacking the election’ they were just concerned with some stolen emails and badly-targeted Facebook ads. But they knew exactly what the masses were hearing, and believing. By March 2018, 66 percent of Democrats believed that Russia had literally hacked voting machines to change vote totals in favor of Donald Trump. And they believed all of this without some fancy lawyer telling them about Hugo Chavez’s Rube Goldberg-ian plot to steal elections by bribing Philly gangsters and the governor of Georgia.

Americans love to believe completely nutty things, just as long as they require the implicit premise that political enemies are corrupt and evil, and preferably pedophiles as well. This is not some horrid innovation inflicted on America by the Tangerine Tyrant. It’s a constant. In most cases, Americans don’t even believe the conspiracies they nominally endorse. Thinking that Hugo Chavez bribed the governor of Georgia or that Bill Clinton murdered Vince Foster is a form of stylized political self-expression more than it’s a theory anyone would be their life on being true.

But NPR’s own reporting on Wednesday demonstrates another reason so many Americans like to believe conspiracy theories: Because they’ve grown used to nominal authorities being untrustworthy. NPR’s leading example of ‘misinformation’ that American’s have come to believe in 2020 is that ‘the majority of protests that occurred this summer were violent’.

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Well, Cockburn wonders, how might they have come to believe that? Could have been that there was rioting and looting in Minneapolis, St Paul, Chicago, Washington, New York, Dallas, Fort Worth, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Bakersfield, Boston, Columbus, Portland, Seattle, Des Moines, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Louisville, Kenosha, Phoenix, San Jose, Sacramento, and even Green Bay? Could it have been CNN attempting sleights of hand about  ‘fiery but mostly peaceful’ protests? Could it have been highly-paid New York Times reporters blatantly cheering on violence?

Nope, NPR is sweeping all that aside, and calling Americans conspiracy-obsessed dodderheads for not buying into the press’s preferred statistical distortions. Behind the belief that violent riots were violent, the next bit of ‘misinformation’ NPR singles out is believing the coronavirus came from a lab in China. Is that true? Probably not. But nobody actually knows where the virus is from, and China has actively suppressed investigation of the matter from the very beginning.

NPR isn’t fighting misinformation; it is labeling a party line as objective truth and dismissing everything outside as misinformation or a conspiracy theory. Cockburn has a daring prediction to make: the more the press resembles ideological propaganda, the more ordinary people will simply decide to believe whatever they want.