National Public Radio this morning ran an “All Things Considered” promo for a story tonight on how the QAnon conspiracy is a reprise of the Satanic cult panic of the 1980s. By 1998, key elements of both were found in this 90-second clip from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Red pills and blue pills entered the lexicon the next year in The Matrix. By 2016, some found it believable that Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi eat babies to extend their lives.
Religion Dispatches laments that Dave Neiwert’s “Red Pill, Blue Pill: How to Counteract the Conspiracy Theories That Are Killing Us” released last fall did not receive the attention it might have:
It is now widely understood, as Neiwert explains, that one driver of conspiracist thinking is a perceived loss of social status. Conspiracy theories are essentially stories “about power: who has it, and who doesn’t.” By constructing fantastical theories that supposedly explain why their believers are being deprived of social status, conspiracists tend to misidentify false targets “as both demonic and a source of pollution, people fit only for elimination.”
I have used the same power phrasing myself. We are social animals, animals wired to read the room for who has power and who does not, and to assess our own place in the pecking order in each setting. Race is just a handy shorthand for people whose awareness of power dynamics is only skin-deep. Humans assign entire peoples to groups whose purpose is to remain permanently at the bottom of the social ladder so that even the lowest higher-ups never will be. See Barry Jenkins’ “The Underground Railroad.”
“Conspiracy theories are the one constant thread that runs through the backgrounds of every right-wing domestic terrorist of the past half-century.” In many cases, those narratives are fueled by moneyed plutocrats determined to secure their own status, Neiwert finds.
The other part of the story has to do with authoritarianism. As Neiwert shows, conspiracist thinking is often closely tied to an authoritarian disposition among individuals who don’t believe in equality as an important social value and would prefer a strongman who will punish the demonic cabal that they’ve been persuaded is responsible for all of their ills. Authoritarians can be found everywhere on the political spectrum, but they are concentrated decidedly on the right.
Neiwert “doesn’t just diagnose the problem,” writes Katherine Stewart:
Drawing on the insight of deradicalization experts, Neiwert lays out “a toolkit that ordinary people could use to bring their friends and loved ones out of the dark world of conspiracy theories and back into the sunlight of reality.” The road ahead will not be easy, he notes, but the work of deradicalization has never been so important. Conspiracy is “a lethal combination that destroys the lives of the people it infects, and then destroys the lives of thousands of innocents whose misfortune places them within their sphere,” he writes. It is “quite literally killing us all.”
The “paranoid style” goes back much further than the 1980s, of course. Housewives were “fighting Communism three nights a week” back in the early 1960s. But widespread paranoia waxes and wanes as a social force. The poor we will have with us always. Also with conspiracists. So far, the poor have never taken down the nation.