Not About Tariffs

 In October of last year The Atlantic ran an article by Charlie Warzel with the lead "I'm Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is."

The subject was the appalling number of Americans who were believing and buying into disinformation and conspiracy theories. And still are. Ask anyone you know who is not so afflicted, and there is a high probability they will tell you they know someone who is.

The phenomenon is one of the great conundrums of our time. When it started to make the news, I, like many other elitist snobs, assumed that anyone who could possibly believe such rubbish was a knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing, uninformed lowlife of questionable mental capacity. But when I discovered that people I knew and respected were buying into such nonsense I was forced to change my mind.

My first response was shock. I had to ask them, "How can you possibly believe this crap?" I never got a credible answer. The answers I did get were mostly in the line of "Well, everybody says so," and when I asked "Who's 'everybody'?" the responses tended to be vague, ranging from the Internet to YouTube to TV personalities (mostly on Fox News; no surprise there.)

The "Everybody says so" line is of course one of DonnyJohn's favorite means of trying to establish credibility for his outrageous lies and overstatements.

One reason we at Vox Populi have been quiet the past several days, is that we've been researching the nature of conspiracy theories and the people who believe in them. It's been maddening. After reading several studies by sources that I trust* the only positive results have been that I'm vindicated in the kinds of questions I've personally asked of conspiracy theorists. And I've learned a new word: "conspiracist."

One graph** I analyzed was an ambitious attempt to conflate results from several studies about conspiracy theories into one package based on the number of theories individuals believed, sorted by 53 sociodemographic definers. I decided to look only at the median response set where slightly more than half of all results landed up. According to my thoroughly unscientific analysis, the majority of people who are very susceptible to belief in conspiracy theories are either Black, Hispanic, or White men or women aged between 18 and 55, without college degrees, and earning a household income lower than or equal to the national median. As with all studies of this sort there were a few outliers: some Black and Hispanic individuals had higher than median income and some Hispanic individuals had college degrees. No gender was specified for the outliers.

The nature of conspiracy theories is easily stated: "an attempt to explain harmful or tragic events as the result of the actions of an unknown powerful group that may or may not be affiliated with government."  

I may be way off base here, but that definition strikes me as being very similar to the generally accepted reason why early humans invented gods: as a means to explain and rationalize natural phenomena.

Let's look at two hypothetical events.

A conspiracist hears that the stock market has crashed. They say, "Well, there's those blasted deep state manipulators at work again." 

Then let's rewind to--say 70,000 B.C.*** Lightning strikes a nearby tree, creating a huge blast of thunder. Kush, a nearby witness, shaken, says, "Dang! There's the lightning god Mawa trying to spear me again." 

How are these different? Both ascribe fearful incidents to a shadowy party believed to have control over worldly events. Conspiracists blame the mythical deep state. Kush blames Mawa. Is it not the same urge to take control by giving the things we fear a name?

But from where does the urge stem? Conspiracy theories aren't new--I first remember hearing some when I was in fourth grade. Of course we didn't call them that then because most of us took them as gospel, but there they were. In my school I think the source was older siblings or just older kids who told us credulous children those "facts" for fun. In the adult world we call that disinformation.

Since then I've heard some strange things that I simply ignored. But remember that definition above? Conspiracy theories arise to explain "harmful or tragic events." There was a spike in them after the JFK assassination, and as our heroes continued to fall and the Vietnam War continued on its horrid way, conspiracy theories surrounded us, but settled down as the war came to an end and no one else was assassinated.

Then came 9/11 and a spike in conspiracy theories, which ultimately played out. Of course the world was still sane then. When COVID-19 hit, after Americans had suffered through three years of insanity, presidential gibberish, and conspiracy theories flowing from the government itself, the floodgates opened and have not closed.

Like most fabulations, conspiracy theories are based in part on fact. Let's look at the widely believed notion of "chemtrails." A great many people are convinced that contrails--those white cloudlike streamers that follow jet aircraft--contain toxins that are meant to brainwash the population, or change the weather selectively, or implant seeds of alien growth, or … fill in the blank with your favorite phobia.

Fact: Jet aircraft leave contrails, which are nothing more than water vapor that condenses around jet exhaust.

Fact: Governments have used aircraft to disperse a variety of materials from fire retardant to Agent Orange, a known carcinogenic and mutagenic chemical.

Consider: Jet aircraft leave contrails in the atmosphere; Aircraft are known to spray harmful chemicals; therefore Contrails are harmful. 

It's a nice syllogism. A is true; B is true; therefore C is true. The structure is at the heart of many if not most conspiracy theories. The argument is false because of the disjunction between A and B, but good luck telling that to a believer.

Let's have some fun making up our own conspiracy theory. I thought I had invented this one but it was hitting the Internet before I could blink. Here's the argument:

Fact A: JD Vance had an audience with Pope Francis about 11:30 a.m. Easter Sunday, 20 April 2025.

Fact B: Pope Francis died of an apparent stroke about 7:35 a.m. the following day, Monday, 21 April 2025.

Both facts are true. Therefore, …  {draw your own conclusion}

 ---Diogenes, 24 April 2025 

 

* Including The Pew Research Center, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Carsey School of Public Policy, UNH, Nature.com, and Statista.com.

** I am intentionally not naming the project or the publication. The conclusions I draw from it are valid for our purposes here, but are superficial and simplified, and do no justice to a broad, complete, and highly nuanced study.

*** The established date of the Blombos Cave Engravings of South Africa. No one knows when language developed, but the appearance of art suggests the pre-emergence of language.