Into the Mind of the Conspiracy Theorist - WSJ
The ability to see the dark patterns behind the sham of reality gives believers a sense of power.
It happens so fast now that I’m no longer surprised. Immediately after the terrorist shootings at Brown University and Australia’s Bondi Beach, my social media feed became clotted with conspiracy theories about the attacks. “Biggest False Flag ever in Australia,” one prominent trust-fund Communist posted on X.com. Other accounts claimed the Brown shooting was a “psyop” designed to justify extreme gun-control measures.
It took several years before the John F. Kennedy assassination or 9/11 conspiracy theories migrated from the fringe to the mainstream. Today, the leap is instantaneous. It happened after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, after Charlie Kirk’s killing and after the attack on two National Guard soldiers in Washington. Every time something terrible occurs, conspiracy theorists tell us to reject common sense explanations. They know who really did it.
While we shouldn’t put too much stock in individual posts from random people online, such fact-free counternarratives quickly spread. I was shocked to see an old college friend—someone I perceived to be liberal but not crazy—speculate on Facebook that both the Kirk and National Guard shootings were planned by Trump associates. Leading media figures amplify these sorts of claims. Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel briefly got in hot water after claiming the “MAGA gang” was trying to hide the fact that Mr. Kirk’s killer was “one of them.” On the right, Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens titillate their huge followings with endless conspiratorial conjectures.
What makes conspiracy theories so irresistible? The conventional theory is that people seek order after a traumatizing occurrence. They want a rational explanation for what seems like a random event. The idea that an alienated loner can assassinate a president is too unsettling, this theory goes; people would rather believe that grander, darker forces are at work.
I think that theory is true to a point, but not the whole story. It doesn’t explain why some people fall fully into the conspiracist mindset. For them, believing a conspiracy theory isn’t just a quirky opinion; it’s an identity. I got to know this mindset well two decades ago when, as editor of Popular Mechanics, I launched the first in-depth investigation of 9/11 conspiracy claims. (In a nutshell, they’re insidious bunk.) The backlash from “9/11 Truthers” was ferocious. You’d think a person who believes our own government is at war with us would live in a state of catatonic horror. But the Truthers who attacked our report were more like happy warriors. Even the death threats they sent us resonated with giddy excitement.
This is the real appeal of conspiracy theories, I believe. They give their followers a sense of power. This happens on three levels. The first is personal. In his 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” historian Richard Hofstadter described how embracing conspiracy theories gives otherwise unremarkable people a mission in life. The conspiracist sees himself as “a militant leader,” Hofstadter wrote. “He is always manning the barricades of civilization.” Conspiracists consider themselves members of a wised-up elite, capable of seeing the dark patterns behind the media’s sham version of reality.
The second level is rhetorical. Throwing out a conspiracy theory is an easy way to derail an argument you are losing. After Kirk’s assassination, conservatives justifiably accused the left of encouraging violence through its celebration of Luigi Mangione, antifa and other violent extremists. Rather than debating the point, many liberals (such as my old friend) essentially said, “Don’t blame us. We think your guy did it.”
Conspiracists also gain an advantage by rejecting any shared source of truthful information. The “official story” is always a lie. That leaves them free to float wild, unsourced conjectures, while sneering at factual rebuttals.
The government and press sometimes do conspire to cover up scandals, such as the likely Covid lab leak and the Hunter Biden laptop affair. So public officials and the media deserve some of the blame for today’s epidemic of conspiracism. But the solution isn’t then to swallow uncritically every unhinged claim.
At the third level, an adept peddler of conspiracy theories can wield actual political power—and get rich in the process. Alex Jones pioneered this business model two decades ago when he rode 9/11 conspiracy theories to fame. According to Fortune, Mr. Jones was worth roughly $14 million when he lost a 2022 lawsuit over his odious claims about the Sandy Hook school shooting. Today Mr. Carlson and Ms. Owens each have more than five million subscribers on YouTube alone.
In recent months, these two popular podcasters have gleefully set factions of the populist right at war with one another. Mr. Carlson recently dredged up long-debunked 9/11 conspiracy theories and raised the profile of antisemitic conspiracy troll Nick Fuentes. Ms. Owens responded to Kirk’s assassination by launching manic insinuations that members of Turning Point USA, and even Kirk’s widow, somehow supported his killing.
While populist influencers are angrily taking sides, few Republican officeholders seem willing to distance themselves from the two misinformation entrepreneurs. That gives Mr. Carlson and Ms. Owens significant sway over the future of the right. “Chaos is a ladder,” as the “Game of Thrones” character Littlefinger says. Whether they believe their own claims or not, promoters of conspiracy theories are sowing chaos. And they are exploiting that disruption for their own advantage.
We won’t solve this problem simply by telling people to “trust the experts.” Our elites squandered society’s trust during Covid and before. Instead, we face the long task of rebuilding trustworthy sources of knowledge. We need to restore the shared space where debates rely on facts, not on politically driven fantasies.
