In the aftermath of the QAnon/Stop-the-Steal insurrection, perhaps it is time to revisit a story I told about a Satanic cult conspiracy from decades ago:
In the misty past before the dawn of the internet (1980?), I was visiting the home of a friend who told me with some alarm that I should never buy any more products from the Procter & Gamble company of Cincinnati, Ohio. Its president, she said, was on the Phil Donahue Show and said the company gave money to the Church of Satan. As proof she told me, you could look on their packaging and see a small crescent moon and stars symbol, a “satanic symbol.”
“When did you see this?” I asked.
Oh, well, she had not seen it. A friend had told her about it. Except, of course, her friend had not seen it either, because it never happened. But because the news came from a friend and confirmed her darkest fears about how the world worked, she never questioned it.
Today Alex Jones makes a fortune marketing such insanity. Donald Trump and the entire Republican Party promote the belief that any elections they lose they lost because Those People stole them. QAnon teaches that the government is secretly controlled by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophile cannibals. More Those People.
But how does Hillary Clinton elude the Secret Service detail that has been protecting her for decades when she sneaks out to devour children at a District pizza joint? Where are the skeletons in shallow graves? Where are the missing children reports, the profiles of distraught parents? Believers have no incentive for questioning allegations that “confirm” the worst about people they already believe are PURE EVIL.
To get caught up in conspiracy theories is not a matter of “ignorance” or “stupidity,” writes John Ehrenreich at Slate. The professor of psychology at the State University of New York–Old Westbury explains:
Conspiracy theories arise in the context of fear, anxiety, mistrust, uncertainty, and feelings of powerlessness. For many Americans, recent years have provided many sources for these feelings. There’s been employment insecurity, stagnating wages, and thwarted social mobility. For some, technological leaps and social progress—expanding views of sexuality, and racial unrest—can feel destabilizing. Then 2020 brought a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, deep economic recession, widespread street protests, and a bitterly contested election. Any of these, taken alone, is enough to trigger anxiety, mistrust, and uncertainty. Americans are facing all of them simultaneously. For those who feel that everything is spinning out of control, a narrative that explains their feelings and encloses them within a safe community of believers comes as a soothing relief.
That’s a polite way of saying they need someone to blame for why bad things happen. It gives them a sense that if the badies could only be outed and overthrown, all would be right with the world. America could be great again (emphasis mine):
What does predict belief in conspiracy theories? A cocktail of personality traits. Those who believe these theories typically show high levels of anxiety independent of external sources of stress, a high need for control over environment, and a high need for subjective certainty and, conversely, a low tolerance for ambiguity. They tend to have negative attitudes to authority, to feel alienated from the political system, and to see the modern world as unintelligible. Conspiracy theory believers are often suspicious and untrusting, and see others as plotting against them. They struggle with anger, resentment, and other hostile feelings as well as with fear. They have lower self-esteem than nonbelievers and have a need for external validation to maintain their self-esteem. They may have a strong desire to feel unique and special, and an exaggerated need to be in an exclusive in-group. Belief in conspiracy theories often also goes along with belief in paranormal phenomena, skepticism of scientific knowledge, and weaknesses in analytic thinking. Proneness to belief in conspiracy theories is also associated with religiosity, especially with people for whom a religious worldview is especially important. These traits are hardly universal among or exclusive to conspiracy theorists, but they help create a vulnerability to belief.
The Wall Street Journal has a profile of one such believer named Doug Sweet. Michael M. Phillips and Jennifer Levitz spoke with him after he appeared on a police arrest list:
Mr. Sweet is a man who dipped his toe in the pool of wild and false conspiracies during the Barack Obama administration and is now up to his neck in it, wallowing in resentment and anger that others can’t see how the elites are scheming to destroy America the way he can.
“I’m not going to go open a court case saying [Ms. Clinton] eats children,” Mr. Sweet says. “But I can believe that she might eat children.”
Sweet gets his news from pro-Trump networks plus Newsmax, One America News, and from Alex Jones. On Jan. 6, Sweet found himself entering a ransacked Capitol after checking with God “three times” that it was okay. Donald Trump had already given his blessing.
In Mr. Sweet’s world of false conspiracies, Financier George Soros is both a Nazi and a Communist who pays leftist activists to burn and loot American cities. QAnon, a conspiracy-theory group that believes Mr. Trump is under assault by devil worshipers, speaks the truth. A Washington pizza parlor serves pies made of children’s blood to Satanists who know to order off-menu. The U.S. military invaded Afghanistan to seize control of the heroin trade. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and House Speaker Pelosi drink children’s blood in a quest for eternal youth.
“I’m not going to go open a court case saying [Ms. Clinton] eats children,” Mr. Sweet says. “But I can believe that she might eat children.”
There is that weakness in analytic thinking mixed with religiosity again. My friend with the Church of Satan story decades ago exhibited a similar mix. In smaller doses vulnerability to belief can be relatively harmless. But it makes such people easy prey for hucksters, faith healers, and cult leaders. Donald J. Trump is two out of the three. Fox in the henhouse? Social media means there is no door on it … and no henhouse … to keep the unscrupulous and/or the insane from infusing millions with conspiracy brain worms.
A Data for Progress/Vox poll released Monday finds that 63 percent of Americans believe Trump is to blame for the insurrection and 51 percent support a second impeachment. Yet 47 percent of people blame Antifa, including 29 percent of Democrats and 68 percent of Republicans. Republican lawmakers and conservative pundits spread the rumor even before the dust settled. And those prone to believe believed.
Consider: Nearly half surveyed believe ragtag, scrawny, 20-something lefties who live in their parents’ basements and never protest without hiding their faces showed up to storm the Capitol, unmasked, posing as beefy, middle-aged white men in expensive tactical gear and organized in teams. Or else posing as beefy white men who beat police with American flags.
The turmoil of the Trump years, if it has an upside, is that between an impeachment and nationwide Black Lives Matter protests, Americans’ knowledge of basic civics has improved somewhat. The Annenberg Public Policy Center found in September just over half of Americans (51%) could name the three branches of government, up from thirty-nine percent in 2019. But teaching civics in schools is not going to build henhouses with doors around Americans’ minds. For that and for the health of the republic, we need to teach analytical thinking itself. Not just for the mental health benefits but as a matter of national security.
Naturally, predators who like their chickens easy to pluck will resist.