The space for respectable discourse and critical thinking is shrinking very fast right now. By targeting the Left with the message, "If you believe in conspiracy theories, you're equivalent to a Trump supporter," they are playing an effective card to scare most normal people into acceptance of the mainstream narrative. The options are now becoming
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For the most part, this kind of conspiracy theory—the idea that sinister forces are secretly engaged in a host of elaborate plots to manipulate virtually every aspect of our lives—has been fairly rare on the American left. Sure, liberal nut jobs have engaged in all kinds of far-fetched theories over the years, wild ideas about the Trilateral Commission and the JFK assassination, that the government created AIDS to destroy the black community, or that George W. Bush had advance warning of the terrorist attacks on September 11. But most of these theories have remained cordoned off from mainstream media; the Truthout story, for example, never circulated much beyond a few fringe web sites. The left has generally presented itself as the sober, rational half of our political discourse, eschewing paranoid fables and histrionic bloviaters in favor of reputable, fact-checked reporting.
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Sarah Kendzior, a researcher and author with a Ph.D. and 247,000 Twitter followers, is a pure example of confirmation bias: She relies heavily on comparisons that are technically plausible but far from definitive. For Kendzior, virtually every action taken by the Trump administration is evidence that we’re in the early throes of an authoritarian takeover. She has compared Trump to Saparmurat Niyazov, the deceased dictator of Turkmenistan, who renamed months of the year after himself and his family members, instituted a new alphabet, banished dogs from the capital, and outlawed lip-synching. She has suggested that Trump hopes to team up with Vladimir Putin to launch a nuclear war against “as-yet unknown shared enemies.†She has tweeted that the Republican repeal of Obamacare was “ominous†because “you don’t pass something this unpopular thinking there will be free and fair elections.†She even cited Trump’s speech to Congress last February, during which he managed to sound momentarily presidential, as “a technique straight out of the autocrat’s playbook.†Anything that doesn’t fit the narrative of imminent authoritarianism, in Kendzior’s view, is just a head-fake—a sure sign of a deeper conspiracy.
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Conspiracy thrives when authority fails. While we find ourselves swimming in a sea of official bullshit and misinformation, Twitter threaders appear with their grim certainty, proclaiming the inevitability of Reichstag fires, and rearranging coincidence and nonsense into clear, readable patterns. They reduce the big, scary world to a single axis, promising that there exists somewhere the one hidden fact, the one shattering revelation, that will undo everything at a stroke. Such assurances not only soothingly oversimplify life’s messy complexity, they absolve us from having to question our own ideological assumptions: If you buy The Palmer Report’s evidence-free allegation that Trump’s victory in Pennsylvania had to have been rigged, you don’t have to face the difficult work of rebuilding a Democratic ground game in the Rust Belt. The magic bullet theory—a term that itself was coined by conspiracists to belittle the official story of the JFK assassination—is a means by which you get to pick and choose your trauma, discarding any explanation you find unpleasant or inconvenient.
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This is an important moment for the left. If we give credence to the wild fantasies spreading virally through Twitter, we open ourselves up to further infection by a new generation of liberal birthers and truthers. What’s worse, believing in conspiracy also makes us less likely to take action: In one study, participants who were shown a video claiming that global warming was a hoax were less likely to believe scientific studies about climate change or sign a petition to reduce carbon emissions. “Exposing the public to conspiratorial thoughts about a specific issueâ€â€”no matter how briefly, the researchers concluded—“may even decrease general pro-social tendencies.†Conspiracy theories, for all their crazy whiteboards and doomsday mentality, make the world seem simpler—and in doing so, they urge us to reject the hard work of organizing and activism, of knocking on doors and registering voters, of staying informed and showing up to town halls, of participating in local and state government, of reestablishing the basic principles of electoral politics that are so desperately in peril.
The promise of conspiracy—that it will assuage our anxiety—is a false one. Watching Donald Trump from the social media sidelines, expecting at any minute that the Deep State will appear and fire a single magic bullet from the Grassy Knoll and put everything right again, is a dangerous delusion. It offers false assurance that you, as one lone individual, can’t do anything, even though American democracy has never needed you more.