Society has entered the age of the conspiracy, and the radicalisation and violence tied to conspiracy theorists will continue as one of the biggest sources of social instability in the Western world. Without having a specific one, two, three, four, conclusion essay in mind, I do want to briefly touch on all sorts of issues with the conspiracy theory in general, and with QAnon in particular. Not a primer of how to argue with conspiracy theorists (a waste of time), so much as a primer of how to understand and critique conspiracy theory-ism as a lifestyle and social phenomena.
Now, I prowl social media far too much; it is a compulsive habit, especially in times of stress, and so I encounter a great deal of conspiracy theory-lite material from my varied, mostly southern Facebook feed; signaling to other conspiracy theories; the sorts of stuff meant to prep and soften interlocutors to believing conspiracy theories; all of the symbiotic life forms that feed and in turn live off conspiracy theories. One sign of someone who is actually a hardcore, bug-eyed conspiracy theorist is any kind of rant about how people that don’t believe their conspiracies (and aren’t part of the conspiracy) are the ones who are really absurd. I like to call it the “No, you suck” argument, as the entire gist is that something not being a conspiracy is more absurd and requires more suspension of belief than believing in the conspiracy theory itself.
Basically, such persons will try and say not believing in a conspiracy theory means one attributes everything to random chance, and then explains everything by coincidence. Which is always an ironic take, for sure, given that the first, and perhaps biggest issue with conspiracy theories, is not on the stretch of connections they make, but at how hilariously dependent they are on Hollywood script-writing and focus-group tested mass-market bestselling fiction. I think easily, beyond the absolute batshit absurd reasons provided (rehashed anti-Semitism straight from the Protocols of Zion, racism, nods to hardcore religious fundamentalism/spiritualism) for actions, and the sheer insane scope of most of these conspiracies, is how reliant they are on simple linear explanations for everything. Most any and every phenomena or event is reduced to an X + Y = C equation. The whole Q thing is especially juvenile, even amongst conspiracy theories (my favorite part is that adrenochrome is a real chemical compound that is relatively easily synthesized artificially and used for certain therapeutic regimens).
There is a difference between coincidence (which is a real thing however) and between non-linear correlation (event A didn’t cause event B, nor were both events a result of event C). A lot of it requires noting that there are such complex chains of interaction, which involve multiple quasi-independent decision making processes and several spheres of influence, (think of chaos theory and its attempts to explain natural phenomena that have many interrelating parts and numerous feedback loops) that direct causation is fairly rare and usually requires one or two degrees of separation at most. A corollary to this is that, and these are the words I live my life by, CORRELATION DOES NOT EQUAL CAUSATION.
Human beings have an innate ability to create patterns, often to see similar sorts of patterns in the same things (stars, Rohrschach tests, etc), it’s a trait that is evolutionarily beneficial, especially for a varied-environment omnivore. If I were to take a black sheet of paper and throw a handful of rice on it, odds are you’d be able to find several patterns in it if you were asked to. If I did this ten more times, there are decent odds you might think you see one of the motifs again, and then once that motif had engrained itself in your mind and you were searching only for it, you’d start seeing it, or seeing parts of it, hidden in the scattered rice grains each time I threw them after that, to which, if you live by QAnon logic, you would deduce to mean I have psychic powers. The same with human events; sometimes things overlap for unrelated reasons. Everyone who goes to Miami does not go there to receive terrorist training from alt-right militias, but rather there are at least three other reasons to go to Miami.
Similarly if I move to City A, and make a new running route starting at a park a few blocks from my house. I want a 10 km route, with minimal hills, easy to remember and a roughly angular, symmetrical shape, and I run it at different times depending on schedule and feeling. If the police arrested me because Central Bank B was robbed and it is right on my running route, and they say several of my running times overlapped with security shift changeovers and argue I was scoping the place out, they would be completely wrong in fact of the matter while still having deduced a logical potential pattern among a huge pool of data. However, it would still not be true, and it isn’t coincidence to say that my running route and times were influenced by other factors and criteria, having nothing to do with the bank, and that sometimes, those criteria overlapped with the bank’s security shift changes (say over a course of months with me running the course nearly 100 times, and often running right after I get out of work, which overlapped with the bank’s security shift changeover).
The flow of history, and the causation of events, is generally the result of millions of overlapping factors (history was, until relatively recently), problematically told via simplified, big narratives, leaning heavily on storytelling, rather than contextualization, which may be an additional reason such forms of thinking are so common). The way history is popularly understood, the way media and movies tend to create and reinforce such simplistic narratives, only reinforces a natural tendency of humans to think in linear terms, or more worrisome, to fail to see numerous co-existing correlatives that all impact and are impacted in return, by actions in a very integrated society.
Storytelling is a great way to explain what happened; if the topic were solely to talk about an event, or to tell of a historical period through the lens of certain actors in the events (whether a reconstruction of one soldier’s diaries in the WWI trenches, or Abe Lincoln’s life and the Civil War). I will assert that storytelling has a place, and nor should history or sociological research of any kind be totally divorced from the microlevel, from the human level. There exists tremendous value in that human level discourse; biographies of important major actors in human history offer a lot of insight into the human psyche and the evolution of society. In general, it is a bad thing to make any one framework the explanation for every phenomena observed; macroeconomics and microeconomics both have insights—Freudian psychology is mostly wrong, but it has certain insights and actually does explain common neuroses of Freud’s historical milieu. As an MA student reviewing the field of anthropology in the 20th century, every theory had insights, and partisans in say, political economy and partisans in postmodernism, tended to devote their time to savagely attacking each other while overlooking that, opposed to say, Trumpism and mainstream Democrats, each side had some solid observations and explanatory mechanisms. So the problem is not that storytelling as a form of narrative and education is an inherently bad tool, inherently flawed, or that it is a slippery slope, but that storytelling is over-utilized. When storytelling becomes a sort of lazy shorthand for history and sociological observations, and when everything becomes character-based, there emerges an environment that is counterproductive to balanced critical thinking, especially insofar as stories and characters become the focus and concrete theoretical analysis (including the definition of power-constraints, resources, and cultural and material limitations), falls to the wayside.
QAnon is built like an ARG; the conspiracy has been successful because it is designed to be fun and interactive, because it connects participants together and creates a sense of community much like a subculture (and has thrived in a lot of subcultures, everyone from edgey screamo-metal, punk rockers, anti-materialist pro-drug activist Generation Xers, and 60 year old knitting-enthusiast-Bible-study-attending-southern-grandmas). Q also connects almost every existing conspiracy theory, becoming ever larger, more convoluted and complex (the inverse Occam’s Razor), tapping into the broad pool of conspiracy-theory curious people as a natural base. I would recommend reading this article (QAnon Is Like a Game—a Mosthttps://www.wired.com/story/qanon-most-dangerous-multiplatform-game/ Dangerous Game | WIRED) to get some perspective on how the conspiracy theory draws people in, starts off small suspensions of disbelief, and then relies on innocuous/vague pattern recognition and social validation to draw people further in. QAnon is the peak of conspiracy theories, the One Ring of conspiracy theories, one theory to rule them all and in the darkness bind them. Parts of it are simply the Protocols of Zion and Nazi era propaganda rehashed, others are straight from the Satanic panic that gripped religious fundamentalists in the 1980s and 1990s (one couple running a daycare in Texas spent 22 years in prison on the basis of an absolutely batshit crazy prosecution, which had children claiming to both be sexually abused, but also fed blood-laced Kool Aid, be flying to Mexico and back during daycare hours, and that a passing adult had even been assaulted and dismembered with a chainsaw, but lacking any physical evidence). The problem is that a lot of past eras of conspiracy theories used to be really difficult to access; a lot of people vulnerable to buying into them and even acting on them, simply never encountered them. Weirdos handing out books and pamphlets on the street and carrying signs have never been an effective proselytization, and there had never before emerged a guided, self-sustaining, self-contained, and highly organized conspiracy theory with a mass following like QAnon.
This is why the fact that even when Q’s predictions or its members’ theories turn out to be wrong, they end up becoming right anyway because someone quickly finds a way to interpret Q’s prophesy post facto that makes it correct, or people make new explanations of reality (that Q was right and the media is just suppressing the truth), to work it into their ongoing epic moral war between good and evil. I would remiss if I didn’t also note that a huge percentage of QAnon followers and taggers do not literally believe everything in the theory and don’t take it nearly as seriously as a normal person objectively should; I have noticed a near pathological desensitivity and immaturity to seriousness and the potential consequences of their rhetoric. In that regard, QAnon is also a symptom of a broader disease of social atomization, alienation, lack of opportunity, economic instability and social collapse (shrinking populations, sky-high drug abuse levels, high suicide rates, high crime rates per 100,000 people) across much of rural America and most of America’s small, hinterlands cities and suburbs. Tech has abrogated the traditional role publishers and distributors had of being gatekeepers, and it is only going to get worse, as nearly perfect DeepFakes are getting cheaper and simpler to make, and the combination of video deepfakes, photoshop, news reports that are simply made up (sometimes at the discretion and direction of anti-Western autocratic governments) will only become more and more prevalent from here out. The fact that Google (and through it, YouTube as well), Facebook, Twitter, other tech platforms have completely ignored and even been openly hostile to the idea that they need to regulate their content, has made it extremely easy for these kinds of fake information or warped outlooks to spread, to fester, and to explode into real world social problems that are literally decaying the fabric of America’s social bindings, while Tech hasn’t even proposed comprehensive rules on the spread of misinformation. Facebook in particular does nothing except at the end of a massive social outcry: even as it speedily insta-removes pictures of breasts and breastfeeding, or temp bans users for writing things like “men are trash”, it has few safeguards against misinformation campaigns or inflammatory speech against marginalized groups and has consistently been slow and incompetent about removing blatant false information about medical issues, and even depictions of violence.
The big question mark for a while, has been how long QAnon survives. MTV became largely obsolete (when at its peak MTV defined a generation’s cultural milieu and drove the music industry), MySpace is a Joke, but are conspiracy theories, like a diamond forever? Q has been pretty resilient, especially in the competitive environment of post-internet conspiracies, where certain theories pop up and then become popular talking points, before dying out. Perhaps the genius of Q is it’s ongoing continuous meta-narrative and it’s cryptic attempts to continue explaining the future as the theory sends online enthusiasts searching to interpret vague pronouncements and connect ongoing events to them. Past theories died out not so much because people stopped believing in them, as because interest died out (there were only so many years were conspiracies about 9/11 could thrive), and when the core followers lost interest and stopped spreading them, and anti-conspiracy theorists of multiple political ideologies shooting down the theories became more prominent than the conspiracy theorists themselves, the theories died down.
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The confessional, online blog post style of 21st essay writing doesn’t lend itself as well to steely focused progression and development as in the classical style, but to set Q aside and return back to the subject of conspiracy theories themselves, there is a difference between conspiracy theory and any unfounded personal belief a person has. Conspiracy theorists almost immediately fall back to equivocation between their elaborate makeshift fantasies and anodyne personal beliefs of others, both to disarm, to discredit, and to make themselves feel like they aren’t a pariah. Believing some unfounded rumor or having a personal belief or conviction about something, or making an assumption about an event or political issue based on a rough view of it that doesn’t contain all the facts—these things are not equivalent to conspiracy theories, even as conspiracy theorists like to invoke them to defend their beliefs and involvement in conspiracy theories.
In another example reducing this concept to myself at an individual level (as I said, discussion history, the individual human level is a useful and interesting topic, both to teach but also to explain concepts), let me explain the difference. I believe artificial sugars, aside from tasting awful, have no health benefits and are modestly bad for you (even compared to concentrated sugars). There’s a decent swath of evidence for this and the dissertation of that evidence is a discussion for another time. This is a relatively common and reasonable, theoretically possible but unproven belief (and a topic of plenty of professional research). I am capable of holding it, and also admitting it might prove wrong, all at the same time. I also believe it’s part of a long-trend of over-sweetening products, capitalism creating an overreliance on mass-produced and over-processed products that has a number of negative effects on people’s health around the world. This is a smaller part of my public health outlook and my opinions on lifestyle. But it isn’t a conspiracy theory because it has no conspiracy and assigns no nefarious motives, and even the large outlook is only interpreting trends in longevity and old-age disease and offering a researched and well-considered explanation that aims to minimize those issues based on contemporary research and academic debate. I am only looking at a human evolutionary tendency (to like sweet things) being exploited for money, but those are again, not assigning a conspiracy and the motive is far too simple for any conspiracy theory (and also something completely open, and which companies are blatantly honest about). If I declared that artificial sugars caused most cases of cancer and impeded our thinking ability (also causing depression and anxiety) and that it was all a Jewish plot to wipe out gentiles, with the aid of a Communist-Satanic cult of elites who all worked together to hide evidence and say blame tobacco and alcohol for cancer, while also making money from the pharmaceutical companies selling anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medications—then I have crossed the road from a simple, general belief about something, and into a hateful, destructive, and unfounded conspiracy theory. Conspiracy Theories specifically explain phenomena in terms of human actors and their linear actions, and universally as a source of evil and blight (have you ever heard of a conspiracy theory where the line was about how good things we happening because of a secret organization moving to improve human life and society without drawing attention or interference). It is this tendency to define operations in terms of organized human activity for a nefarious motive, that separates a conspiracy theory from a more general belief.
The reasons why people like conspiracy theories, now that I have defined the term a little more specifically (nowhere near perfectly, but I am aiming for a general commentary of moderate length), are also very simple and not hard to understand. To explain the appeal of the conspiracy theory, one need look no further at the very chaos the theories explain. Conspiracy theories put both the giant flow of history and the complicated, messy flow of contemporary events, (where actions are often in the gray area) into an easy to grasp framework, with bad guys clearly demarcated and comic book bad. The sense that even an evil force is secretly in control means that 1) the world has a steering wheel, 2) there is actually a framework, an order of the world that is both linear and also easy to understand, making generous use of easily accessible pre-existing symbology and biases, and 3) the contradictions and hypocrisy of modern society are explained (easing cognitive dissonance). The psychological profile this appeals to is also a separate discussion (and tends to naturally skew conservative and traditionalist in outlook), but needless to say, is a large demographic.
One curious aspect of all this for me, is that the actual conspiracies that existed in government and private business, that such conspiracy theorists will point to, are mostly limited operations, dealing with some narrow project and, more importantly, they all failed or at least failed to maintain secrecy, being well-documented by journalists, dissidents, or other security apparatuses and NPOs. The difference between unethical Research and Development and a conspiracy theory is at this level difficult to discern, and whether the CIA experimenting with crude Mind Control using a mixture of drugs and psychological conditioning, or the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the facts came to light relatively fast because of the insanely difficult logistics of managing large groups of people all the time and the more people know something the more likely it is to leak out, and the larger the project, the more people required (it is a negative feedback loop that prevents large-scale successful conspiracies). The issue is that all the examples usually highlight just how hard it would be for even a small-scale conspiracy to successfully exist; even with elite professionals and access to huge cash resources the CIA bungled numerous times and its involvement in coups, mind control research, and other coverups was more or less an open secret, documented or leaked repeatedly over the years (just not always given proper press coverage). Most of the time these conspiracies (if you can even call them that, and not illicit activities, scandals, corruption, etc) fail to hide their actors or their aims, and most of the time they have as their impetus simple ideological or material motivations (stopping communists and atheists, making money, gaining access to useful new tools to use for your country’s geopolitical advantage, expanding your department's power/procuring funding), or the simplest one of all: fucking up at your job and trying to cover up that you fucked up, even in cases when you aren’t sure what happened or how you fucked up. In the case of the German Reichstag fire (cited by more than one conspiracy theorist I know on Facebook; yes, these people know no irony) it was more or less a flagrant and obvious false flag even at the time (but with the circumstances sufficiently vague and shrouded in the literal darkness of night that the Nazis were able to plausibly argue their version of events, aided by a gullible/frightened media), used shamelessly by the Nazis but now the basis of every false flag conspiracy theory on the internet.
What is most bizarre about the very popular QAnon and umbrella conspiracy theories is the absurdity of their motive explanations. 9/11 conspiracy theories had a simple logic, namely that the government perpetrated the attacks in order to expand its powers, expand the police state and surveillance organizations, and wage war on troublesome geopolitical actors. The theories are completely wrong about everything, and have been disproven on numerous levels (from the physics to the practicalities of such a conspiracy), but the theory explanation fit with the aforementioned simple motives of real conspiracy and at least had an inkling of realism. Whereas with QAnon, a broadly popular and mass followed conspiracy is literally just arguing that the world is controlled by a cabal of Satanists who ritually murder and sexually abuse children and harvest their blood for Adrenochrome, which they use to stay young and healthy. The motive in this massive conspiracy of everyone from Hollywood actors and producers, to all major media outlets, large swaths of the military and police, much of the government, and most international corporations, is literally Satanists and child sacrifices, with a huge dose of pedophilia and child sex trafficking (the one real world issue amidst all of that). The theory basically sells the Satanic panic with a dim sum spread of unrelated conspiracies involving the expansion of government power, to huge effect. Ours is an era of substantial technological and societal change, and anxieties about technology, as well as anxieties about government outreach, find a natural home in the theater of the absurd that is QAnon specifically and conspiracy theories more generally.
Lastly, I can’t help but bring up the fact that, even aside from independent causation (wherein unrelated factors create patterns or connections), coincidence is a real phenomena. Absurdly unlikely phenomena do happen. Slightly different from the traditional telling of the story, Joseph Figlock was hit by falling infants twice while walking the streets of Chicago. Roy Sullivan was apparently struck by lightning seven times (to the extent it was documented by his employer, the National Park Ranger Service), Jeanne Calment lived to 122 (and recent Russian attempts to obfuscate this actually caused a drive to redocument her life and unearthed even more overwhelming evidence that she really did live to be 122, and that no, her daughter did not switch places with her mother to avoid taxes), and so on. Unlikely things occur within the broader realm of what I like to term Things That Happen, or TTH, which is the full universe of outcomes. Coincidence in the sense of unlikely happenings has a long and illustrious history in literature as well, even as it is now frowned upon. Aside from the literal deux ex machina, which were divine interventions, coincidence was also properly recognized as a major force in the past. Charles Dickens and many 19th Century novelists made use of coincidence as plot drivers partially because they saw the work of random chance make such large impacts on their lives and those of their friends and acquaintances. Properly judging coincidence from con or lie is an admittedly difficult task, and believing coincidence exists does not mean ceasing to be a skeptic or interrogating the evidence behind every claim. Similarly, picking out blatant cheating in Athletics requires sussing a lot of factors critically (everything from how realistic a performance is compared to the backdrop and the biophysical factors of the athlete in question), and even then really good cheaters with huge resources can get away with cheating (see Lance Armstrong, who was only caught when one of his own team spilled the beans). As with cheating and coincidence, the sign of a shallow and lazy mind (and susceptibility to conspiracy theories) is throwing away skepticism and logical questioning in favor of a one-size-fits-all cynicism (everyone cheats, there is no coincidence, etc), which is essentially ditching all the functions of a discerning, informed, adult in favor for uniform and uninformed judgments.
Archduke Ferdinand was only assassinated because his carriage drivers got lost and stopped to ask for directions at the very cafe his would-be assassins had retired to to commiserate over their inability to murder him. Robert F. Kennedy’s staff made a last second adjustment of plans and changed his route accordingly; cutting through the kitchen area as a shortcut; a decision made minutes before Sirhan shot him. Going through the kitchen took him through exposed and unsecured areas (though he only had three bodyguards to start with, only one of them professional), and Sirhan Sirhan 1) worked at the hotel, 2) hated Kennedy and was fixated on the Arab-Israeli conflict and U.S. support for Israel, 3) had violent impulses and an unstable personality, and 4) had recently acquired a handgun with the help of his brother, with a trail of financial transactions that investigators could track. The attack was witnessed by dozens, and Sirhan’s actions thoroughly documented, and yet the legends of a CIA conspiracy still exist even there (down to some witnesses changing their testimony or claiming to have seen another gunmen that no one else saw). Every part of that conspiracy theory has been thoroughly discredited (save the audio forensics, and audio forensics, especially of old source material of poor quality, is only slightly above quackery and is both highly subjective and has kept both Kennedy assassinations' conspiracies alive and well in recent decades), right down to conspiracy theorists identifying ex-CIA staff in the photo who were 1) identified already by police records, and 2) in one case had died of a heart attack 6 years before the assassination. In this event, there was literally a last minute decision made to skip a gathering with supporters and go over to the press room to meet with reporters, which was not the officially planned itinerary. Either you say the CIA had both his campaign staff and bodyguards in their back pocket, or they were waiting (with a brainwashed patsy) for any such chance to come by, or you cannot really explain the chain of events with the conspiracy theory version.
Both Kennedy assassinations are interesting in that they draw a lot of leftist adherents and always have, despite both being astoundingly unrealistic when you understand the documented events, like the trajectory of Oswald’s bullet, the layout of the parade car Kennedy was in, Oswald’s circumstances before during and after the assassination, or Sirhan Sirhan’s diary entries declaring Kennedy must be killed and his logged trips to shooting galleries with an illictly purchased firearm, as well as the lack of any explanation as to how and when he was brainwashed, and how the second shooter failed to be noticed by anyone at the time (the one or two witnesses who later claimed a second shooter only did so with hindsight, which is not 20/20, especially given the proneness to suggestion). Occam’s razor provides a much shorter and unsatisfying explanation that is entirely logical and equally unsatisfying. I want to use the Kennedy assassinations as an accessible (and non-batshit crazy) conspiracy theory to dismantle, but also to point out how to be a skeptic and distinguish between reasonable conjecture and unreasonable conspiracy.
The Occam’s razor explanation starts and ends with the little accepted fact that Presidents and powerful people are vulnerable to assassination at any moment. This fact creates two questions that have to be answered for it to be acceptable: 1) why don’t state actors assassinate leaders more and 2) why don’t more powerful leaders get assassinated? To answer the first question, state actors do assassinate powerful and prominent people or have a hand in it, usually blatantly, and not just in wartime. Though the CIA, much like the British, typically only provide logistical support for on the ground allies who actually do the dirty work (and whose excesses the agency, in full hypocrisy and immorality, sighs and accepts as the cost of doing its business), thus giving them plausible deniability and insulating them from criticism. The Russians flat up murder with radioactive Polonium isotopes in teacups that poison half a restaurant, or nerve gases, among other glaring assasinations meant to send a message to other potential rats or troublesome dissidents, and while they deny it, the Russians’ techniques are too flashy and too easily traced, and the traces of pulling off such an attack always belie their official involvement, simply because of the resources and expertise required. If the first question specifically refers to world powers, that would have to be because for many centuries now, murdering non-warring powers’ leaders has been off-limits. Especially when the consequences of war far outweigh the benefits of the action. Cost-benefit equations are an important part of a skeptics arsenal, and are critically lacking in conspiracy theory evaluations, as large-scale organizations and state level actors do not do things where the cost is disproportionate to the benefits (even the broader hypothetical benefits). Also call it the motive operation. The security apparatus around state leaders also functions best against other state actors or large-scale organizational planning. If ISIS ever planned to assassinate, say, Angela Merkel, state security level agencies would catch it and prevent it, because it requires planning and movements of different pieces, with international planning and lots of people knowing about it. State security is very good at dealing with organized plots that involve an outside group trying to get its people close to a leader or get a poison or the like to a leader. If some random bank security guard was a functioning psychopath with an irrational hatred of Merkel due to her refugee policy, and she happened to do a tour of the guard’s bank as part of her professional itinerary, this guard could just randomly pull a gun and shoot her. That kind of reckless, impulsive crime of opportunity is by its very definition an operational hazard of being a leader and it is one that security has a difficult time completely countering (though even then, whether the odds are low or high depend on huge list of factors, like angle of attack, nearness of security to Merkel and to attacker, crowding, distance of attacker, weapon used, competence, and so on).
The second question is that security measures for major leaders have improved steadily and consistently over the years, and agencies have designed protocols to create distance and remove opportunities for random psychopaths to have opportunity to murder. Unscreened corridors of movement, interactions with large numbers of unscreened people, sniper risks and the like, are all heavily regulated. Various assassinations and near assassination attempts do still go through, but because of the aforementioned cost-benefit equation, these attempts are always the work of stand-alone terrorist cells or psychopathic individuals who gain access and opportunity. Even Abraham Lincoln had a bodyguard whose job it was to stand outside the door to his private balcony and who instead was a drunk who left his post and went down to watch the play up close. Successful assassinations are about as likely as you expect them to be given they require several factors, including a lapse in security, and a psychopathic individual who doesn’t care about being caught or dying, and an opportunity to act, to align just right. Even then, as with the attempted Reagan assassination (which there are some leftist conspiracies about being a GWHB coup with CIA involvement despite the massive paper trail of Hinckley’s involvement and stalking/psychotic obsession with Jodie Foster), even when you get those three lined up, the attempts can still fail. Gerald Ford was almost assassinated twice in one month, both times by women (the only two female assassins in the history of the U.S.), one of whom would have probably shot Ford in the head had she had her original gun (which she was highly familiar with) and not the replacement one she was forced to use.
Both Kennedy assassinations were a result of carelessness and poor security, much more blatantly so for JFK, who did an open-car parade in a heavily developed downtown with numerous high-rises, and who was warned by the Secret Service that they couldn’t guarantee his safety as they pushed for a change to a covered car for the parade. The assassinations occurred when psychopaths who hated the President got a window of opportunity and took it. Conspiracy theories argue the improbability of that sequence, but John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy did thousands of events and encountered millions of people over their political career, and had a cavalier attitude about open access to the public and doing impromptu greetings in unsecured areas and meeting freely with huge numbers of people. Kennedy’s parade route alone gave tens of thousands of potential assassins access to an opportunity. The fact that neither of the two public figures had been assassinated until the final event, is itself evidence that it is an improbable event. Your outlook on the entire world cannot be to simply disbelief anything that is improbable, because the improbable happens all the time; improbable does not mean impossible. Distinguishing between the impossible, or the absurdly improbable, is what it means to evaluate evidence and take a skeptical eye to important events; it is what makes up the entirety of critical thinking and critical reasoning skills. Simply pointing out that a chain of events has a rare outcome means nothing, for how much conspiracy theorists treat it like a proverbial smoking gun.
Real conspiracies do exist, but ordinary people have a tendency to massively over-assume the intelligence and competence of the wealthy and powerful. I always think back to the amazing and informative journalistic piece by Leland Nally in Mother Jones magazine (https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/10/i-called-everyone-in-jeffrey-epsteins-little-black-book/) about their experiences delving into that real conspiracy. The truth is so mundane that people prefer the image of brilliant, intelligent, dangerous elites, who work flawlessly in massive conspiracies that prey on and harm the masses, while ignoring that the elite do this already and do it openly, with hyper-luxurious lifestyles and behaviors little different from theft. The revelation, which has been my perspective for a long time, is that most rich and elites are vain and vapid, egotistical and narcissistic, full of cliques and pathetic people who got rich either from the genetic lottery or equally good luck and good timing. I have long felt like Donald Trump is more the rule rather than the exception to the world’s elite; that it is a group filled with mediocre people with an overly high opinion of themselves and their abilities, mistaking power and wealth as synonymous with competence and uniqueness. This is why Trump and his family of charlatans have, until the January 6th riot, always been accepted and involved in the social life of Manhattan and the rich elites across the nation. It is why when you find those rare individuals who are truly decent and/or exceptionally competent, they tend to distance themselves from elite social life and focus on their own personal philanthropic endeavors (think Dolly Parton or Jimmy Carter or J. David Bamberger and the Selah ranch). There are the occasional folks with brilliant minds and brilliant memories, or other exceptional talents, who are a part of elite society, but they are the exception and not the rule, and even then, are often emotionally crippled and prone to destructive and inappropriate behavior/poor impulse control (like Bill Clinton for instance), or display hallmark traits of sociopathy (Ted Cruz and John Edwards for example).
The hardest sell for me, for conspiracy theories, QAnon more than any, is the assertion of a perfectly coordinated and hidden international organization of elites (and millions of low-level middle managers at least) all working towards a single goal, with unified concepts of self-preservation, going to elaborate lengths (Jewish space lasers, fixed elections, staged school shootings, etc) to secretly accomplish their aims (while openly signaling their membership in the conspiracy through easily recognizable iconography and symbols that just happen to be coopted from Christian occult-imagery and Western pop culture????) without anyone fucking it up. I have done DnD, getting 5 friends in the same team with the same end goal to synchronise the party’s actions and strategies is like herding fucking cats. Even in a more formal situation, as a teacher, or a community organization leader, getting people to follow a plan in a timely and competent manner is impossible; being in a leadership role of any kind is basically a matter of predicting the general range of probable outcomes and getting ready for potential fuck ups, while pushing/manipulating people to do doing the assigned task. And now I’m supposed to believe a transnational group of all backgrounds, ages, genders, and races is doing this while controlling the government and international media? To borrow a Japanese idiomatic compound, 笑止千万, or simply put, unquantifiably ridiculous. The vain, pretentious, egotistical people that make up most of the elite figures in society actually being part of a massive conspiracy, is such a ridiculous proposition that I would believe aliens were responsible for everything sooner than I would the QAnon explanations.
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The final note I have is on who likes QAnon and conspiracy theories more generally. It’s important. This demographic factor is also an important note on contemporary societal fragmentation and conflict, and the coming decades of violence we can probably expect as a result. There is a reason why nearly half of my extended circle of family and acquaintances in Louisiana are at least QAnon-curious or share parts of it and other conspiracy theories. Why it is exploding through the South, but especially through evangelical circles and splitting congregations and dividing evangelical leadership. That is because conservative Christian Evangelicals in America and the world over are inculcated from youth into a disturbing view of Satan as omnipresent in the world; evil and temptation are already usually the direct work of Satan, as ubiquitous as God; the anti-God. The movings of the world are already absolute, building towards an epic battle between good and evil that nearly every generation of Christians ever has always believed to be imminent!, with the absolute and infallible figure of God (the inevitable winner), and the illogical and imperturbable, petty, destructive evil of Satan. This is the fundamental ideological narrative of the religion, and modern conservative evangelicalism, both Catholic and Protestant in America, teaches this narrative in absolute and literalistic ways, such that to most devout followers, the line between figurative and literal is unclear at best and doesn’t exist at worst. Anyone who grows up in religious evangelical households will share about how the closeness of Satan and Satan’s involvement in any societal ill or evil their church set its attention on, was, along with the presence of God and Jesus, a constant presence in the lives of their community. In that sense, all QAnon has done is give Satan human actors to do his bidding, bound by their blood pacts with him or whatever, acting in unison because they have sacrificed their free will to his malevolence. This comes on the heels of decades of radicalization by far-right evangelical groups, the rise of biblical literalism and self-help, Gospel of wealth Christianity, and hostile political rhetoric that has already dehumanized and made evil an entire political party and a wide swath of reasonable beliefs through decades of reducing nuanced and morally complex beliefs to: baby-killers and sodomites (with healthy doses of sexism and moral purity policing for women and their bodies/careers).
There’s a reason why a majority of (White) evangelicals have by and large bought into QAnon throughout the South and much of the rest of the country, driving the polls showing at least a third of the country believes some of this conspiracy theory, despite how bonkers it is. QAnon is so popular among many veins of evangelicalism, and it so closely follows the doctrines and rhetoric the teachings of evangelicalism already indoctrinate people into, that even the highest levels of mainstream evangelical leadership remain either silent on it (for fear of angering congregations), or make the most anodyne of criticisms. The rarity of full-throated, visceral denouncements of QAnon from respected, credible, and powerful leaders of evangelical Christian movements (though some have come, they have mainly been the intelligentsia of the movement, published in magazines and insider websites, and not broadcast on the internet or directly to congregations, or to put it differently, come from behind the scenes intellectual leaders, not the charismatic figures who are the face of the movement), is a key part in the conspiracy theory and its ideology’s cancer-like spread and normalization in “polite society.” The tendency of evangelicalism to promote a simplistic view of the world and of casualty/reasoning as linear (and good or evil), is a part of a belief and teaching system that teaches everything is going according to God’s will, and that Satan is ever-present, undermining God’s teachings and trying to corrupt Christians or lead others to oppress Christians. Is it any surprise that such a disturbing and dark umbrella of religious teachings (one that teaches that this world and the world of the flesh is inherently evil and the base state is sin) creates a tendency for paranoid schizophrenic-like world views? Or that such people embrace dark conspiracy theories of every variety at much higher rates than the general public? Or that White Evangelicals are the leading anti-coronavirus vaccine demographic in America by a long-shot?
There aren’t simple solutions to dealing with conspiracy theories, for the very reason that they intersect so deeply with preexisting social divisions and a whole swath of separate, underlying belief systems. Fighting extremism and undermining the organized propagation of dangerous conspiracy theories requires outreach and alliances from prominent community leaders among the groups most affected. But the consequences of failing to do so are dire.