You will be familiar, of course, with this style of political discourse. It is hard to avoid these days — particularly in the United States, where for at least the past five years, whole news channels have given themselves over to an endless barrage of Epstein speculations, vaccine panics, Russian collusion allegations, and UFO babble. It is characterized by a kind of hyperactive manufacture of hidden plots to explain what is going on in the world, coupled with an almost hermetic fascination with the deeper meaning behind coincidences and symbols: the logo of a D.C. pizza shop, for instance, is evidence of the pederastic blood rituals that go on in the upstairs room; or Donald Trump’s bizarre grammar on Twitter and Truth Social, which actually contains hidden kabbalistic messages about his ongoing war with the Deep State. It is invariably met with noisy disapproval in other, more respectable media corners, where academics and experts rally like the counterrevolutionaries of the Vendée, “debunking” the feverish allegations, “calling out” the online rabble, and usually agitating for a return to good, old-fashioned virtues like “trust in government” and “standards in public life”.

Perhaps the greatest debunker of them all was Richard Hofstadter. As a young historian in the Thirties, Hofstadter had flirted with Marxism-Leninism, but by the time he gained tenure at Columbia during the most feverish years of the Cold War, he had traded in his class-based conception of history for a more institution-friendly liberalism. His magnum opus — The Paranoid Style in American Politics, recently reissued — was first published in 1964, when conspiracy theorizing in America was at a high point. The US government was still reeling from McCarthyism; rumors were swirling around concerning the death of JFK, and the Republican Party was in the process of being hijacked by arch-paranoiac “pseudo-conservative” Barry Goldwater. Hofstadter believed that liberal America needed new, diagnostic terms if it had any hope of weathering the storm.

More from this author

On cannibalism and Jeffrey Epstein

By Thomas Peermohamed Lambert

In the end, it was a term from psychiatry, “paranoia”, that seemed the best fit. This was partly because it was non-partisan (paranoia, Hofstadter generously points out, is “not necessarily right wing”) but mainly because “no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind”. After all, Hofstadter explains, paranoia isn’t simply a kind of madness. In fact, the paranoid mind is in many ways “far more coherent than the real world”. The greatest paranoiacs are sticklers for careful scholarship (“McCarthy’s 96-page pamphlet, McCarthyism,” observes Hofstadter, “contains no less than 313 footnote references”). They display the kind of maniacal interpretative zeal that is also found among rationalist philosophers: everything must fit into their schema, and nothing — no verbal similarity, no coincidence, no pizzeria logo — is permitted to go unexplained.

As a history of conspiracy panics in US political life, The Paranoid Style in American Politics does an excellent job. Hofstadter manages to amass an extraordinary amount of detail in just a few pages: beginning with the immediate post-revolutionary period, when John Robison’s treatise on “the Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies” captured the imaginations of New England puritans, who worried that secular secret societies might undermine the congregations and institutions they had worked so hard to set up. Even more winningly outlandish is Hofstadter’s account of the forgotten American tradition of anti-Jesuitism, with its profusion of salacious, tell-all memoirs from ex-nuns — one of which, Awful Disclosures, written by Maria Monk in 1836, was probably the bestselling book in American history until the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. By the time we reach the 20th century, it is hard not to agree with Hofstadter’s well-known contention that “American politics has often been an arena for angry minds”.

But what about explaining the American propensity for paranoia? Like all good academics, Hofstadter is very clear about the explanatory claims he is not making: “In using the expression ‘paranoid style’”, he assures his readers, “I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes.” But if this essay is not an attempt at psychological classification, what is it? Hofstadter’s final interpretation is curiously toothless: “a mentality disposed to see the world in this way may be a persistent psychic phenomenon, more or less constantly affecting a modest minority of the population,” he speculates; “certain religious traditions, certain social structures and national inheritances, certain historical catastrophes or frustrations may be conducive to the release of such psychic energies.” The essay ends soon after. In fact, it is hard not to finish The Paranoid Style in American Politics without beginning to wonder whether Hofstadter might actually have something to learn from the conspiracy theorist. The conspiracy theorist, at least, has the temerity to ask the big sociological questions: What is behind all this? What does it all mean?

Part of the problem, I suspect, lies in the “debunking” mentality which Hofstadter and his fellow Cold-War liberals forged, and still characterizes much of the American establishment today. For the debunker, the salient fact about the conspiracy theorist is his departure from the truth: conspiracy theorists are disordered, delusional, and need to be corrected by a stern, patrician voice telling them how things actually are. But when you talk to conspiracy theorists, you tend to find that their operative notion of the truth is rather different. There is often a humorousness to people’s adoption of conspiracy theories — or, at least, a kind of perverse pleasure or comfort. In conspiracy theory, in fact, the relationship between “truth” and “belief” seems to land rather closer to what one might find in Pascal, or Nietzsche: a sense that the conspiracy theory is true in an artistic sense, the way a metaphor, or allegory, might be true. They are ways for people to parse or understand complex situations without the conceptual vocabulary to do so in a more literal way. Even if you don’t quite have the time or resources to articulate a full account of all the different ways in which the DNC is corrupt or austerity is misguided, you can still say “Hillary Clinton eats babies” or “David Cameron had sex with a pig”, and everyone, on some level, will understand what you mean.

What dark truths might Hofstadter’s American paranoiacs be articulating? I suspect it might have something to do with the United States’ political system: after all, even Hofstadter notes the fetishistic preoccupation the purveyors of the Paranoid Style have with subverting political institutions — freemasons walking among the Founding Fathers, Jesuits infiltrating the government, Communists taking control of the Senate. And curiously, conspiratorial fantasies of subversion do seem to crop up in post-revolutionary liberal societies like the United States with remarkable frequency. The German historian Reinhart Koselleck has argued that something like Hofstadter’s Paranoid Style can be observed in France, Germany, and Italy in the late-18th and early-19th centuries — often using a lot of the same “secret society” imagery. No sooner does a country declare a liberal constitution that guarantees power to the people, than those same people declare it to be the product of freemasons, or Illuminists, or Jews, or Jesuits — any group, really, so long as it isn’t them.

For Koselleck, in fact, conspiracy panics are simply what you get when you combine liberal societies’ endless rhetoric about “openness” and “transparency” and “mass participation” with the rather more exclusionary and secretive reality of the modern liberal state, with its faceless bureaucracies and standing armies and legions of spies. They are a way of explaining away dissonance, wriggling out of the double bind that comes with being a modern citizen. The applicability to 18th and 19th-century American history is obvious: “I know that America ought to mean liberty and prosperity and a bright future for myself and my family,” thinks the American paranoiac, “and yet all around me I see a decaying oligarchy that seems to hold my abstract freedoms in pretty low esteem. Ergo: America must have fallen victim to a plot, an infiltration.”

Suggested Reading

John Robison: the first tech bro

By Frederick Kaufman

Nor is it particularly hard to see why conspiracy theories might be so popular in America today. Liberal institutions are creaking more loudly than ever before: since the Patriot Act of 2001, the very bodies that are supposed to safeguard abstract freedoms have voted to support mass state surveillance; and all across Congress, the custodians of the “transparent” lawmaking process seem to be writing policy with the sole intention of making money from some mixture of insider trading and Polymarket gambling. Under such conditions, paranoia works as a way out, a psychic salve for the citizen who all his life has believed the state to consist of a bright and noble set of ideas, only to discover that it is in fact run by flawed, greedy people. Its true function, therefore, might well be a good deal less radical than its sufferers would like to admit: the more time you spend looking for government subverters in the local Jesuit mission or masonic lodge, the less time you spend looking in the lobbying industry, or big business, or the institutions of government themselves.

Anthropologists have been making this kind of argument for decades. When an ethnographer glosses, say, vampire panics in Malawi as an example of a culture reckoning with its colonial past, or South African zombie scares as a response to globalization, scarcely anyone raises an eyebrow. But for some reason, the lavishly funded debunking institutions in contemporary media — BBC Verify, the Stanford Internet Observatory, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab — seem incapable of applying the same logic to Western societies. They just keep on checking isolated fact after isolated fact, maintaining the steady burble about “fostering transparency” and “countering disinformation” that is expected of them. They are, in short, just like Hofstadter, spending so much time crowing about the conspiracy theorist’s total lack of epistemic reasons for his beliefs that they fail to mention his abundance of causal ones.

Perhaps the real lesson in all this is that the best political and sociological thinking always has a whiff of conspiracy theory to it. After all, to understand the world, you have to subject it to an immense simplification; you have, like the paranoiac, to come up with totalizing metaphors that you believe capture vast, sprawling processes — whether “capitalism” or “patriarchy” or “modernity” or “globalization”. Indeed, you don’t have to be a sociologist to suspect that part of the reason why a lot of stolid, dependable media institutions are suffering a collapse in trust — despite the millions they have poured into their in-house debunking commissions — is that they have failed to make such leaps of interpretative simplification. There really are deep structural explanations for the latest inner-city stabbing, the latest riot, the latest bomb detonated in a distant, sun-baked part of the world, but you would be hard pressed to find them grappled with satisfactorily on the BBC. And if there is one thing The Paranoid Style in American Politics really does prove beyond all reasonable doubt, it is that the public’s conspiratorial imagination cannot be switched off by complacent talk of “fact-checking” and “debunking”. When an entire media class neglects the biggest issues of its day, some people cannot help but posit something vast and shadowy behind it, nudging the tiller, pulling the strings.

“The Bermuda Triangle is one of the most dangerous places on earth,” YouTube’s #1 creator, MrBeast recently declared as he introduced one of his infamous video shorts. “Over 100 ships and planes have gone missing with no explanation.” Beast and his bevy of tattooed-and-man-bunned bros, along with an arsenal of Lightsabers, begin their journey into the terrifying spiral of death by writing their wills. The act would prove unnecessary, as after 24 danger-free hours in a luxury yacht, they return safely to Miami — and 264 million views.

The myth of the Bermuda Triangle is now 80 years old. The inaugural date of the mystery is generally accepted as 1945, when a squadron of five TBM Avenger torpedo bombers set off due east from Fort Lauderdale, never to return to base. Navy investigators attributed the loss of Flight 19 to navigational error and running out of gas, but later that year, four other fighter jets disappeared. Then, just two summers ago, in August 2023, a small plane left Fort Lauderdale only to dematerialize into the ether about 17 miles west of Eleuthera.

Scientists have sought to quell suspicions of some great, evil force with rogue wave simulations, high-altitude balloon launches, and aircraft searches. But to no avail. The white-coated eggheads continue to insist there is nothing unique about these one-million square miles of ocean, despite the incontrovertible evidence of an AI video making the rounds on Facebook of a drone catching a sea monster in the act of bearing hundreds of razor-sharp teeth.

“There is no evidence that mysterious disappearances occur with any greater frequency in the Bermuda Triangle than in any other large, well-traveled area of the ocean,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association declared in 2010. The insurance market Lloyd’s of London agrees, and there is no surcharge for ships passing through this dreaded neighborhood. The US Coast Guard and the US Navy have both given the official “nothing to see here” — which is precisely what every conspiracy theorist would expect them to say.

The myth got juiced in 1964, when an article appeared in Argosy Magazine asking the not-so-innocent question: What is there about this particular slice of the world that has destroyed hundreds of ships and planes without a trace? The article was followed 10 years later by the “bestselling saga of unexplained disappearances” (straight from the jacket copy), The Bermuda Triangle, by Charles Berlitz, which sold more than 20 million copies and became an ABC Friday Night Movie. The producer was none other than Arthur Rankin, Jr., who was also responsible for animated features such Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Frosty the Snowman, and the clearly conspiratorial Year Without Santa Claus. Rankin died in 2014, aged 89 — in Bermuda.

More from this author

Jaws spawned American carnage

By Frederick Kaufman

All of which begs the question: Why did the Seventies become such fertile ground for American conspiracy theory? Did all that LSD eaten at Woodstock cause a culture of hallucination? Was it marijuana-induced paranoia? The nightmare of the Vietnam War broadcast every evening into American living rooms? OPEC driving gasoline prices through the roof? Whatever the reasons, Pew Research Centers polls showed a 40% drop from 1964 to 1974 in the number of Americans who would trust the government “to do what is right just about always/most of the time”.

One thing is certain: the publication of books such as The Illuminatus!, None Dare Call it Conspiracy, and The Turner Diaries, alongside movies such as The Parallax View, Executive Action, and Soylent Green indicated a major uptick in Seventies conspiracy culture. Fleetwood Mac cashed in on the paranoia with “Bermuda Triangle” (“Nobody seems to know just what it is/And the Air Force won’t let on”), while Milton Bradley Corporation (purveyors of “Connect Four,” and “Twister”) released the Bermuda Triangle Board Game. The goal here was to earn $350,000 by moving different goods (lumber, sugar, bananas, oil) to different ports without being swallowed by a bluish ink stain in the middle of the board that somehow stood for the “sinister mystery cloud” that “hovers, weaves and sweeps”. In short, junior’s first lesson in contrails as a smokescreen for globalism.

Of course, it’s easy to mock disco era conspiracy, illustrated in that episode of Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman, “The Bermuda Triangle Crisis”, still being discussed by creepy nerds on YouTube who surround themselves with plastic replicas of Princess Diana of Themyscira (available on eBay for around $50). The episode featured a megalomaniacal arms dealer named Ramond Manta, played by Charles Cioffi of X-Files fame, who has taken over a secret island in the Triangle to build a secret army — coincidentally at the very same spot where the United States is building a confidential nuclear facility. Perhaps Jeffrey Epstein’s private island emerged from this same playbook? Little Saint James — aka, Paedophile Island — is located within the same general area.

All of which is to say that a seldom noted element of conspiracy culture is that the QAnons and MAHAs of today were board game-playing, FM-radio listening, cartoon-watching children of yesteryear. A November 1976 episode of Jabberjaw, a short-lived, third-rate popular animation starring a great white shark with a Brooklyn accent, was devoted to “The Bermuda Triangle Tangle”. Thus were a generation of kids initiated into conspiracy culture.

And once the kids understood the basics (devilish sect of subversives intent on global domination), the next step was to make it sexy. In 1975, the ABC Movie of the Week was Satan’s Triangle, featuring a requisite floating ghost ship, a failed helicopter rescue, and Seventies-style casual sex with a platinum blonde, Kim Novak, who just happens to be possessed by the devil. The femme fatale formula proved to be so successful that four years later came a virtual carbon copy called The Bermuda Depths. The screenplay was written by William Overgard, who was best known for comic strips, which makes a great deal of sense since there is always a cartoonish element to conspiracy.

The Bermuda Depths debuted Connie Sellecca, who tromps around in a bikini oblivious to the dangers posed by a Godzilla-sized evil sea turtle that brays like a pack of humpback whales as it makes its way through the turbid blue. Sellecca’s career would reach a peak of sorts when she made the cover of People magazine wearing a $30,000 bridal gown for her wedding with proto-MAHA New Age musician and health guru John Tesh, who would eventually suggest on Parler that we might combat Covid with a “world of divine healing”, which “does not involve Dr Fauci or the Dominion software”.

By the close of the Seventies, the Pentagon Papers, Agent Orange and Watergate had proved beyond a reasonable doubt that there was indeed a deep state involved in all sorts of nefarious deeds. And writers and producers had their ears to the ground. Roddy McDowall made as much clear in an episode of the science fiction series The Fantastic Journey, in which a ship filled with scientists passes through the emerald mist of the Bermuda Triangle, which compresses past, present and future into a single moment. The conflation of time has similarly become an essential element of modern conspiratorial thought, wherein the assassination of JFK, 5G and the dot-com boom coalesce into a single matrix of evil plotted by a secret sect of power-hungry evil-doers, intent on global domination.

The problem now is what was once the purvey of animated oversimplification has gone to the top: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth with his Dr. Evil directive: Kill everyone. Kristi Noem as the ICE Barbie leading legions of masked goons. Presidents so old and doddering they cannot complete a grammatical sentence. Tech-meisters like Peter Thiel railing about the Antichrist. The idea that there will soon be trillionaires. Our present-day cartoon world is fit for the frayed neurons of MrBeast’s 300 million plus followers.

It seems America’s intellectual landscape, for all its super-tech whizz-bangery, has failed to advance beyond the tropes of Sunday morning cartoons, Movies of the Week, and plastic replicas of loin-cloth Diana. It should come as no surprise that as we reach the 80th anniversary of those evaporated TBM Avenger torpedo bombers, no celebration has been planned. The hoodoo of the triangle endures quite well without it.

The film is a remake of South Korean director Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 release, Save the Green Planet!, which delivered a giddy masterclass in slasher comedy. The original featured a bulimic beekeeper on a mission to abduct a pharmaceutical CEO who he believes is an alien from the planet Andromeda, and thus save the world from apocalypse before a band of idiotic cops — led by a detective with a hyperactive sense of smell — can get to him. It’s the kind of wack-cinema in which the wild-eyed protagonist prepares to torture his victim by coating a white-hot, foot-long steel dildo with gobs of lube — that is, utterly off the hook. This sort of macabre just desserts for the 1% was no doubt satisfying to a South Korean audience 20 years ago, embittered by class disparity, and thirsting for some lavish, if elusive, revenge.

In Jooh-hwan’s zany bricolage of dungeons, electrodes and death by killer bees, the cardboard-cutout characters are no more than vehicles for violence against long-standing power imbalances, and to their credit, Lanthimos and Bugonia screenwriter Will Tracy were smart enough not to delve too deeply into the psyches of their revamped dramatis personae. These aren’t characters so much as caricatures, each standing for sociological mega-tropes of America’s decline and fall — the corporate CEO, the basement-dwelling extremist, and he who no longer has the capacity to process what the hell is going on. Each seeks to negotiate their way through a senseless world beset by maniacal irrationality.

It’s clear from the remake that comedy has become passé. A farce, even one drenched in buckets of blood, cannot serve as an adequate response to the plague of anxieties in today’s United States — from pharmaceutical poisons and school shootings to the National Guard knocking down doors to arrest housekeepers and hairdressers. The tragic message of the remake is inescapable: the conspiracy theorists have seized the day.

Lanthimos updates Joon-hwan’s characters by switching the gender of Green Planet’s evil CEO. Instead of a pharma bro, we get a pharma babe. Michelle Fuller, played by Emma Stone, graces the cover of Forbes. She knows Michelle Obama and spends a great deal of time perfecting the nuances of her social media feed. She is also dedicated to cardio, which means she can beat the living crap out of any incel with bad intent, even in those black Louboutins.

That doesn’t stop her from being abducted by Teddy, the scuzzy conspiracy theorist played by Jesse Plemons (aka “Meth Damon” from Breaking Bad) and his cousin and sidekick, the extraordinarily disheveled Aidan Delbis, whose real-life neurodivergence delivers striking pathos. And if there’s any doubt that Michelle is from a galaxy far, far away, our anti-hero Teddy points out her narrow feet, her cuticles, the cute overbite, and the fact that he has discerned “Andromeda code on her Instagram” — a phrase that in and of itself should garner Tracy a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Shorn of her luxurious locks so that she cannot “be tracked” by her allies who are orbiting the earth in their spaceship, as Teddy patiently explains to Donny, Fuller languishes in chains, a gender-switched Samson awaiting the inevitable return of her powers. As Michelle schemes her escape, the losers ride their rusted bikes through the blight of exurbia. As Teddy tells Donny: “No one on earth gives a single fuck about us.” Perhaps they should.

The plot of Bugonia is virtually identical to Save the Green Planet!, which may be because the warped and damaged men of the digital dystopia are really not so different from the warped and damaged males of any age, shape or time, all of whom might relish the sadism of sticking a girlboss like Fuller with a syringe full of sedatives and locking her up in the dark. The only difference between the original and the remake is the absence of that white-hot dildo, for the boys of Bugonia have chemically castrated themselves so as not to be tempted by womanly wiles.

And yet, despite a two-decade-old plot that leans into every horror cliché in the book, Bugonia is very much a film for our time. The popular motif of alien invasion has taken on a new profile since the release of Save the Green Planet!, as the comic contrail-counters have matured into power players. “Doing the research” has transformed into US public policy, with the tin-foil-clad brigade now holding Cabinet-level positions in the Trump administration, advocating against Tylenol and seriously considering whether or not there is any gold at Fort Knox.

Then there is the dialog that lacks the essential give and take of, well, dialog. Even a power-pill plutocrat like Michelle, supremely confident in her ability to sway opinion with endless streams of public relations sophistry, can make no headway against Teddy in the bizarre dinner-table discussion that serves as the intellectual core of film (while Donny squirms in his seat, complaining that he has to pee). Here, it becomes clear that Michelle’s corporate doublespeak and Teddy’s “resistance” gibberish are two sides of the same irrational coin. There is no middle ground, no solution.

Suggested reading

Film buffs are Frankenstein’s real monsters

By Poppy Sowerby

It therefore comes as no surprise that when a handcuffed and bloody Emma Stone eventually inquires, “Can we have a dialog?”, the answer is a straightforward no. Michelle may inform Teddy that his theories have no basis for his truth, that he has lost himself in an internet echo chamber, but it’s all in vain. He simply takes an axe to her knee.

The implications of all this are so unsettling that the film has left the critics desperately trying to evade articulating — or perhaps even contemplating — the obvious point. In their reviews, they earnestly discuss whether the film is about corporate duplicity and greed, or perhaps an allegory of Covid, or a musty rehearsal of Antifa versus tech. That is, anything but America’s descent into irrationality and violence.

Lanthimos has said that before he begins shooting a new film, he makes a habit of re-watching The Red and the White, a Hungarian pièce-de-résistance from 1967, directed by Miklós Jancsó. Banned for many years in the Soviet Union, it delivers a stunning condemnation of the senseless evils of war, as soldier after soldier is lined up and executed, only for the next brigade to arrive, and the shooter himself to be shot. History repeats itself: Hungary in the grips of Soviet Communism, South Korea in the shadow of Kim Jong-Un’s atomic arsenal, and now, the United States in the grips of unreason that has now threatens to undo the very foundations of this country. This is a director who understands the chaos and absurdism of our age.

Of course, it’s clear from the start of Bugonia that skeevy vapers and gamers like Teddy and Donny don’t stand a chance. But as it turns out, neither do the slick CEOs. No homo sapien can escape the mess of being human. When the cosmic joke of the film is eventually revealed, it’s a reminder that not only have Teddy and Donny and Michelle lost the thread, so has everyone else. We can’t blame it on pharmaceuticals, the economy, or the internet. As Teddy has understood, our propensities towards self-destruction are programmed into human psyches. “Your core,” he tells Michelle, “has already been infected.”

It was funny 20 years ago. Today, not so much.

Ever since a now-retracted study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention linked black mold to infant pulmonary hemorrhage in the Nineties, mold mania has been raging. On TikTok, #toxicmoldillness posts number in the hundreds of millions of views. Reddit is a trove of evacuation diaries: families forced to abandon their moldy homes, possessions and pets. GoFundMe hosts pages begging us to “Save the Tyler Family from their Toxic Mold Nightmare!” and “Help Kimberly Heal: A Young Woman’s Fight Against Toxic Mold”. And while sufferers appear to span the political spectrum, the crusade has been taken up with particular zeal by the online Right.

Chronic inflammatory response syndrome, or CIRS, is having a moment. While the condition is not recognized by most medical bodies, true believers report a cascade of symptoms resulting from “mold toxicity” which are oddly evocative of long Covid: neurological impairment, fatigue, respiratory woes, hormonal upset, and so on. Of course, science does accept the pathology of mold: many of us will remember the death of the toddler Awaab Ishak in Rochdale, eight days after his second birthday. Awaab had grown up in a council house filled with black mold, which sent him into respiratory arrest. In the dank houses of rainy England, mold is a real and grave concern. But what mold does not do, as far as the science shows us, is cause CIRS. The British government’s guidance on mold exposure published in the wake of Awaab’s death lists potentially fatal respiratory illness, irritation or rashes on the eyes and skin — but that is it. Under the heading “mental health effects”, it acknowledges that poor mental health may result from mold but does not concede any psychoactive or neurological effects, rather pointing to “unpleasant living conditions”, “frustration” and “social isolation” as causes. The advice is conservative but clear: the mammoth list of CIRS symptoms are simply not attributable to mold. Likewise the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology offers a robust breakdown of CIRS’s plausibility, noting that companies were offering urine-testing kits which were “problematic” and “lacked standardization”. These are not disinterested parties.

Suggested Reading

The manosphere meets its match

By Lily Isaacs

Tell that to the internet. Or to the actress Tori Spelling, who flits in and out of urgent care with children in tow in a “continual spiral of sickness” which she blames on repeated “mold infections”. Or to Brandi Glanville of Real Housewives infamy, whose bizarre, disfiguring health battle has involved a parasite “moving in her face” (a more likely explanation, of course, would be a botched plastic surgery job). In one Instagram video, she shakes uncontrollably while undergoing Hollywood-approved lymphatic drainage; in the caption she blames “black mold poisoning from a toxic house we lived in”. Mold mania has even made it to the American Cabinet: RFK Jr., the pseudoscience-swilling health secretary, has linked it to autism (a typically nuance-crushing claim not backed by evidence).

Then there’s Chris Williamson, the ex-Love Island contestant turned life-coaching podcaster who this month released an incredibly unsettling vlog entitled “It’s Time to Talk About My Health”. At the time of writing, the video had 1.2 million views. In it, Williamson, a big name in the aspirational masculinity market, describes a time of acute personal crisis: brain fog, loss of libido, emotional numbness and depression. The culprit? “My body was filled with environmental mold.” He lives in hotel rooms, paranoid about fungus lying in wait at home. He endures byzantine testing rituals — waking in the night to breathe into tubes, avoiding light, timing fluids to the ounce — then undergoes increasingly baroque homeopathic procedures because, as one white coat testifies, “traditional allopathic medicine hasn’t caught up”. The vlog culminates in Williamson undergoing a procedure to “clean his blood” in Mexico, completing the cycle from masculine rationalist to raving medieval bloodletter, undone by invisible devils in the body and desperate for physical catharsis. His moldy manifesto seems to be the final form of the manosphere’s “biohacking” obsession: pain, purification, Sisyphean struggle.

More from this author

How posers conquered politics

By Poppy Sowerby

But the archetypal mold truther is Jordan Peterson, coincidentally a guest on Williamson’s podcast and a star of that same male self-improvement scene. In August, the Canadian psychologist’s daughter, Mikhaila Peterson, announced that her father was “taking time off of everything” due to CIRS, having recently been “exposed to a particularly moldy environment” while cleaning out his late father’s house. Peterson was said to have been “near death”, spending “almost a month in the ICU”; the mold was to blame for “cancelled shows, cancelled events, sporadic appearance of being run down and general weepiness”. Peterson had been battling CIRS since 2017, she said. But the case was not straightforward; it was not even the first time Mikhaila was announcing that her father had been close to death. In 2020 she told the world how he’d been debilitated by a separate struggle, this time with benzodiazepine withdrawal. Five years later, an invisible enemy had clawed him back to despair. Peterson’s case is murky and unusual — but Mikhaila’s account did not acknowledge these complicating factors: “The fact that doctors don’t generally recognize that mold exposure in indoor air is causing chronic health issues is insane,” she wrote. Fungus was also the key factor in “our food sensitivities and inability to tolerate anything other than meat” (she and her father both live on an all-meat diet).

It is not anyone’s place to argue with someone who says they are ill; many of those in the “moldie” community (self-christened, may I add) are likely to be genuinely unwell, just not in the way they think. In our anti-scientific climate, advice from bodies such as the CDC is being degraded by chronic and poisonous skepticism. CIRS did not spring from nowhere: it thrived in the cracks of the public square over years of populist feeling. What CIRS really represents is paranoia, distrust, and a fatal lack of understanding.

The diagnosis is, by no coincidence, also a metaphor for the Peterson mythos. He himself is the archetypal internet patriarch — a proponent of self-discipline, wary of pollution both moral and cultural, laid low by spores in the walls. His family sees this illness as both biochemical and “spiritual” (Mikhaila’s words); it represents an establishment sickness that ignores the little guy and abandons him to splutter his last. But the entire diagnosis rests on contested laboratory markers and anecdotal recovery stories, and the interventions of practitioners who are financially incentivized to keep patients’ paranoia alive. As in all health panics, empirical weakness is rhetorical strength. If the experts deny it, that only proves the conspiracy.

Frankly, the cult of CIRS has driven “moldies” mad. Two sufferers who were interviewed for an article in The Cut come across as hypervigilant exiles: one, a woman from Florida, says: “My nose is like a detector of mold. I smell it in almost every house I go to.” A Maryland man says: “There’s actually thousands of us who are living in their vehicles or RVs or tents.” This life-wrecking paranoia is what CIRS is all about: not being believed, fighting an enemy you cannot see but that you insist is there.

In that same article, The Cut describes online forums where users trade reports of “mold rage” — sudden mood swings and the surfacing of harrowing repressed memories blamed on spores in the vents. As with any contested condition, there remains a basis of scientific truth: mold can make you hallucinate. Ergot, the fungus from which LSD is derived, does so when ingested. In the Middle Ages, grain infected with this could, when baked into bread, send entire villages into delirium (the condition was known as St Anthony’s Fire). Uncanny, the BBC’s podcast about hauntings, recently featured a case in which a young man believed that a ghost was helping him wash his hair in the shower; the resident paranormal skeptic suggested that the mildew in his flat may have triggered visions. Under real-world conditions, simply breathing in mold would not provide a sufficient dose to cause delirium: stress, anxiety, depression, sure, but not the neurological effects (brain fog, dementia etc) described by CIRS. For many, the link is nonetheless powerful and evocative: the spore stands in for entropy, psychic seepage. One of the internet’s favorite in-jokes is that the writer and women’s rights campaigner J.K. Rowling has been “turned evil” by black mold which appeared, in one photograph of her living room, to be growing on the walls; “her TERF brain worms may be caused by fungal spores,” writes one sniveling Redditor. Of course, what looked to be a spreading infestation was actually just an unusual wallpaper; but the creeping corruption of mold is a far more compelling story than that.

The allure of CIRS lies both in its metaphorical power — the idea of hidden toxicity everywhere — and its simplicity: if you can name the mold, you can kill it. The problem is that depending on quack procedures which claim to remove fungus from the blood is unmoored from science and reality and will not help these people, many of whom evidently need some sort of intervention — medical or otherwise. It was just weeks ago that the Right was ridiculing the snowflake nepo baby Violet Affleck for telling the UN that everyone should be wearing masks, and that politicians were stealing young people’s future by allowing the pernicious spread of long Covid. Long Covid is also the subject of a culture war, fuzzily understood and probably commonly misidentified, but compared to CIRS it at least holds water as a diagnosis. If we really do have a mold problem, it’s that “mouldies” themselves represent a creeping degradation of science and trust in establishments, the inner rot of fact-free paranoia which is yanking us back to the Dark Ages.

It’s hard to accept, for example, that those who perished in the Holocaust did so in vain. It seems discourteous to the dead to suggest that their death had no point. But part of the horror of the event is that there was indeed no point to it, not even from the Nazis’ own viewpoint. You don’t need to massacre six million people in order to create a bugbear or scapegoat. Some of those who were killed had skills which the Nazis could have used in the war effort, just as they could have used the men and machinery tied up in running the concentration camps. What purpose the whole project served was metaphysical rather than practical. Annihilating Jews was an attempt to abolish the frightful form of non-being they stood for, which threatened the very foundations of the Third Reich. Even that, however, was as counterproductive as murdering Polish metal workers, since the Nazis were entranced by a dream of purity, and nothing could be purer than nothing.

More from this author

In defence of stereotypes

By Terry Eagleton

Conspiracy theories are out to purge human life of chance and coincidence. They restore a sense of purpose to a civilisation which seems without design or direction. The claim that paedophilic Jewish reptiles from a distant galaxy are running the banking system may take some believing, but so does the claim that the large number of young black men killed or injured in police cells is purely coincidental. And there are, of course, plenty of real conspiracies. Not all of them are the product of collective paranoia. Some paranoiacs really are persecuted, just as some hypochondriacs genuinely are ill. Jean-Jacques Rousseau had the misfortune to be both. The dictionary defines a conspiracy as a secret plan to do something harmful or unlawful, in which case such groups are about as common as kindergartens. Why are they so widespread? Partly because it’s consoling to detect human agency behind a world of anonymous forces, and partly because it’s pleasant to find fellowship with other conspiracy buffs in a world short on solidarity. It’s just that the latter aim might be better served by joining a Pilates class.

A lot of American conspiracy theories spring from the sheer vastness of the country. To impose some political coherence on this far-flung terrain is one reason why the word “America” is used in the States far more often than the word “Portugal” is used in Portugal. “Swedish” or “Hungarian” are purely descriptive terms, but “American” is a positive value-judgement as well as a national label. “A very fine American” means an outstanding example of a valuable species. One doesn’t imagine that the Albanians spend much time asking God to bless their country, as Americans do, or that Belgians see themselves as specially favoured by the Almighty. It’s true that a Peruvian army officer once exhorted his men to “always remember that you are Peruvians”, but this is mildly comic because nobody has much idea of what being a Peruvian means, probably not even the Peruvians. It would be like being urged to be an authentic inhabitant of Maida Vale. There are hordes of people in Ireland who see the nation as blessed and its soil as sacred, but they are known as Irish-American tourists. America, however, has to keep on talking about America in order to forge some unity out of its plurality. It has even adopted that phrase as its national slogan. In many ways, this drive for unity has been stunningly successful, as the tone in which a waitress in South Bend, Indiana says “Have a good day” is an exact replica of the tone you’ll hear in Roscoe, South Dakota. There are those, however, who fear that this cultural uniformity is not exactly what the Founding Fathers meant by freedom.

Suggested reading

The fairy-tale allure of conspiracies

By Mary Harrington

Because the nation is so immense, Americans are particularly sensitive about their space being “invaded”. They can occasionally be heard to murmur “excuse me” if they come within six feet of you, which is not true of the residents of Beijing. Large tracts of space help to breed individualism, and Americans are adept at keeping their spiritual as well as physical distance. Even some of the poorest dwellings in the country stand proudly in their own meagre patch of land, unlike the tightly stacked terraced houses of post-industrial Britain. All this is the opposite of the carnivalesque, a condition in which bodies are merged and mingled to the point at which it’s hard to know where one ends and another begins. The stereotypical American body, by contrast, is squeezed tightly into its own space, sealed against disease and conscious of its precise boundaries. It’s surprising it isn’t wrapped in cellophane. Carnivalesque bodies, being devotees of Dionysus, are often drunk, a state in which their boundaries become messy and inexact, but Donald Trump is a teetotaller. There’s a relation between the fact that he uses others’ bodies purely as instruments of his own power and desire and the fact that he is a germophobe. Mexicans can be repelled by walls and barbed wire, but germs are invaders of the body politic too tiny to be rounded up and deported. As wholly invisible immigrants they represent a Right-wing nightmare.

Conspiracy theories draw on the anxiety that things which should be distinct are actually commingled, and by no means for the good. This distinctness should be true of the nation itself, which is only diminished by being locked into trade agreements or international treatises. Yet we now live in a world in which, as the narrator of Orhan Pamuk’s The White Castle remarks, seeing everything as connected with everything else is the addiction of our time. The modern philosopher whose vision reflects this most starkly is Hegel, which is why Freud once remarked that philosophy is the nearest thing there is to paranoia. There are no free-wheeling cogs in the machine of global capitalism. Nothing is allowed to exist purely for its own sake, which used to be the privilege of the work of art.

Some years ago, if you smoked on the street in the United States, it was possible to have the cigarette knocked out of your hand by a concerned citizen, if not in Manhattan then perhaps in Wichita Falls. This wasn’t only because smoking can kill you, or because the States is a profoundly puritan nation somewhat given to self-righteous moralising. It’s also because smoke represents a contaminating connection between one body and another, insidiously undermining their autonomy. The model of human contact becomes infection. Smoke eventually grows invisible, yet remains lethal and ubiquitous all the same. It is thus a perfect symbol of the menacing powers detected by conspiracy theorists, which determine our lives and confiscate our freedom but which, like the Almighty himself, are both everywhere and unlocatable. These forces are toxic, contagious, all-pervasive, without any identifiable source and well-nigh impossible to overcome. In all these ways, they resemble the theories which claim to expose them.

In this sense, conspiracy theories exemplify the forces they seek to hunt down. When a pandemic breaks out in this context, as it did in 2020, it isn’t the virus that the less enlightened sections of society regard as deadly, invisible, infectious and omnipotent, but the state which tries to protect them against it. At a time when bodies actually need to be insulated from each other for their own good, they cast off their protective masks in the name of liberty and demand to be allowed to breathe together — another irony, since breathing together is the literal meaning of “conspiracy”.

The Nazis saw themselves as avant-gardists at the very cutting-edge of technological progress, but they were also deeply archaic. If they were modernisers spellbound by the future, they were also obsessed with myth, ritual, astrology and the occult. When reason is reduced to a bloodless, purely instrumental form of rationality, it leaves a space into which the irrational can flood. This paradox is now being repeated in Trump’s America. The last word in technological wizardry co-exists with a belief in demonic powers. At the very peak of modernity, we are turning back to the Middle Ages — to a world of diabolical forces and weird convergences where nothing is what it seems. There is less and less between the world of pure appearance of Hollywood on the one hand and the invisible machinations of the deep state on the other. Between the two, everyday reality is being squeezed to death. There is still suburban middle-class life, but scratch the surface and you will find monstrous predators and blood-lusting fiends. The place where humdrum reality and diabolical powers meet is known as paedophilia, or some other unspeakable crime. The United States is a Gothic movie in which horror lurks behind every icebox and beneath every kitchen table. The trouble is that the Saviour whose mission is to send this nightmare packing is the most lurid manifestation of it of all.

Whether Carlson makes this face strategically is hard to say; it’s certainly a fortuitous way for someone in this line of work to look, but is it also just how he looks, generally. He got a lot of mileage out of it when he was the primetime poster boy at Fox News, monologuing on such matters of national importance as the gender identity of the green M&M. And he’s working it to great effect in his new interview with Larry Sinclair, a man who has spent the past 15 years alleging that he once engaged in a drug-fuelled homosexual liaison, in a Comfort Inn, with the then-not-yet-President Barack Obama.

“What was Obama like on crack?” Carlson asks, and then pulls the trademark face while Sinclair meanders through an answer. It’s a neat trick. The pundit’s new self-produced show on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, is a lower-budget affair than the Fox News position from which he was fired in April; it doesn’t allow for such technical flourishes as a chyron. But he doesn’t need one: Carlson’s expression alone creates the impression of a subtextual thought bubble floating invisibly somewhere above his head: Do you believe this shit?

Full disclosure: I, for one, do not believe this shit. It’s not just Sinclair’s less-than-credible history, which includes multiple convictions for fraud and forgery, or the lie detector test he voluntarily took and summarily failed back in 2008 when he first levelled his allegations. It’s that the substance of Sinclair’s claims is wildly out of keeping with virtually everything we know about Obama, if not in terms of moral goodness, then certainly in terms of his ambition. Even Obama’s fiercest critics would surely concede that a man who structured his entire personal and professional life around making himself electable was unlikely, as a married state senator at the very start of a long-desired and painstakingly planned-for political career, to risk it all for the sake of $250 worth of cocaine and a blowjob.

But more importantly, does Tucker Carlson believe it? It’s not unreasonable to be a little bit cynical on this front. There is, arguably, a burgeoning effort afoot by certain members of the media to take Barack Obama down a peg, retroactively tarnishing his presidential legacy as well as his reputation for being a paragon of moral uprightness. Obama’s continued presence in Washington has been raising eyebrows among conservatives from basically the moment he left office, and some have begun to openly speculate that he’s acting as a sort of puppet master to the addled senior citizen currently occupying the White House.

And of course, there’s the matter of Carlson’s own integrity. Like many American media personalities, he does not necessarily believe all the words that come out of his mouth on camera. Among the revelations that preceded his ousting from Fox were text messages in which he privately contradicted his on-camera stances on Donald Trump and the 2020 election, which he publicly described as a “scam”. “We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait,” he texted a producer in the days after the election had been called for Biden. “I hate him passionately.”

In this case, though, there’s a peculiar twist. Carlson has chosen to platform Sinclair’s allegations, which he describes as “obviously true” — but his ultimate contention is that the substance of the allegations doesn’t even matter.

“You know, in 2008 it became really clear that Barack Obama had been having sex with men, and smoking crack,” Carlson told podcast host Adam Carolla on a recent episode of his eponymous show. “It’s not gonna change the world that Barack Obama likes dudes… I’m just saying, the amount of lying in the media about it was unbelievable. People knew this was true! And it was quite obviously true at the time, and people who covered the campaign didn’t say anything about it because they didn’t want to lose access to the campaign.”

It’s intriguing to realise that as far as Carlson is concerned, the real story — and the most interesting thing about this sordid tale of crack-smoking and secret gay sex — is what it reveals about the relationship between media and government. What’s also intriguing is that this is the one area in which Carlson has something that sort of resembles a point.

More from this author

What kind of woman rides the New York subway?

By Kat Rosenfield

Unlike the #MeToo-era allegations that sank the Senate candidacy of Roy Moore (or, for that matter, the ones that could have caused considerable trouble for Joe Biden in his run for president), Sinclair’s story does not appear to have ever been rigorously investigated by the media. The few stories to even mention Sinclair’s existence also summarily dismissed him as a kook and a criminal — and while journalists’ incuriosity at the time may be understandable (not least because Sinclair is, in fact, a kook and a criminal), it has also ironically created the sense that there might be something there. Conspiracy theories flourish in the dark, which is why even the most ludicrous ones (like, say, the notion that Obama looked on while his personal chef drowned in Martha’s Vineyard) are often worth taking the time to debunk. If journalists had seriously looked into this story back in 2008, and exposed it for the flimsy pile of nonsense it surely is, there would be no intrigue or mystery still swirling around it today.

Alas, there is — and Tucker Carlson knows it. For him, the salacious content of Sinclair’s allegations is essentially irrelevant; if anything, it’s just icing on the cake, a good old-fashioned sex scandal to titillate the senses and besmirch the character of an especially revered elder statesman. The real story, the one that Carlson is not only offering this week but has also been selling in various forms for a decade, is that a cabal of elite power brokers have conspired for 15 years to deprive you — yes, you — of the knowledge that these allegations even exist. It’s the cultivation of what Matthew Teague calls “a conspiracy of knowing”, the sense of being offered a glimpse of the secrets that a faceless, nameless They aren’t telling you.

Suggested reading

Tucker Carlson's fake populism

By MICHAEL CUENCO

Even if Carlson doesn’t believe Sinclair, he does seem to believe this: that the allure of forbidden knowledge is so exciting that it renders moot any question of whether that knowledge is true. This is what Carlson’s critics miss when they condemn him for giving airtime to such a sordid, unverified story (even Elon Musk had doubts as to the newsworthiness of the interview), or point to it as further evidence of how far Tucker has fallen since his days at Fox. Carlson’s transformation from hacky pundit to tabloid bottom-feeder is a salacious bit of gossip in its own right, but is it the real story? Or is it about something bigger: power, and the question of who is in thrall to whom?

With the imprimatur of a Fox News primetime spot, Carlson could claim to be a bold truth-teller, the rare insider who would give it to you straight and make you feel lucky to get it. Without it, he’s just another guy trying to spin — and sell — a story. It’s a tale of audience capture as old as time; one minute you’re riding high as a media industry insider, the next you’re hawking virility supplements and shouting about gay frogs. Carlson isn’t quite there yet, but the altered symbiosis between him and his audience makes it all but inevitable. He isn’t doing this because it’s what he wants. He’s doing it because it’s what you want.

And in this, he’s not alone. In a world where a subscription-based model of journalism blurs the line between consumer and customer, entertainment takes precedence over information more often than not, and journalism evolves from a truth-seeking enterprise into a bias-stroking device. And as long as people believe that the news should make them feel good, and their enemies look bad — and as long as any attempt to inject truth or nuance is met with threats of revolt — we have a future full of many, many more Larry Sinclairs to look forward to.

Planned for the Serpukhov district south of Moscow, it is to be a home for Western expatriates who are tired of the “radical values” of their supposed democracies. “Today, they have 70 genders — and who knows what will come next,” Beslangurov reportedly told a conference in St Petersburg. He claims they have identified around 200 “normal people” to move there, mainly Christians fearing the end of their faith in the West.

There is already a small community of Westerners in Russia: some, such as Australian John Helmer, have been there since the Cold War, while others have emigrated more recently, including ex-cop and fugitive Floridian John Mark Dougan, who skipped town just as the FBI was about to arrest him on hacking charges. Even more have arrived in the past year, firmly picking a side in the war against Ukraine, as ex-US soldier John McIntyre did. This rump of foreigners is more critical to upholding President Vladimir Putin’s legitimacy than it is given credit for.

The Russian-based Canadian Eva Bartlett, for example, uses her social media channels to advance the idea that the fighting in Ukraine is a “US proxy war against Russia”, and that Western media and US intelligence agencies are covering up “the fact that Ukraine is committing genocide”. She vents to her 150,000 followers on Twitter, and another 32,000 on her Telegram channel, and is still promoted by far-Left groups in Canada. Meanwhile, Thomas Röper, the German-Russian editor of a pro-Russian blog, whose YouTube channel has 120,000 subscribers, has travelled throughout Russian-occupied Ukraine at the invitation of Moscow, even serving as an “international observer” for sham referendums held in the Donbas region.

Suggested reading

Dodging shells on Ukraine's eastern front

By David Patrikarakos

McIntyre, for his part, was initially fighting alongside the International Legion of Territorial Defense of Ukraine, the unit defending Ukraine against the Russian invasion. Then, earlier this year, he deserted, only to pop up in Moscow not long after. He claims to have been spying for Russia from the very beginning.

Russia has been only too happy to give these figures a home and a platform. Bartlett and Röper are both frequent contributors to the RT propaganda network, and were also invited, alongside Dougan and several other Westerners, to testify before the International Public Tribunal on Ukraine: a series of hearings, run by a Russian government body in Moscow, that have accused Ukraine of war crimes and developing biological weapons.

In some cases, these influencers reinforce Russian foreign policy. Bartlett, for example, has toured Syria at the invitation of Bashar al-Assad, and helped peddle the idea that rebels and internationally respected medics launched chemical weapons attacks inside Syria, rather than the Syrian military. It’s a thoroughly debunked allegation that aligns closely with the obfuscation pushed by the Russian government and its client, al-Assad.

Suggested reading

The Prigozhin roadshow isn't over

By Aris Roussinos

In other cases, they reinforce the idea of Putin as a benevolent actor. Over the past year, the President’s personal future and the longevity of his kleptocratic regime have been shaken to the core: beset by a stalled invasion; destabilised by an aborted coup; and frustrated by the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Russian citizens fleeing his partial mobilisation. Throughout it all, Moscow has tried to project not just strength and stability, but the idea that Russia is a guiding beacon for the rest of the world, a symbol of traditional values.

This certainly works in Africa and the Middle East, where Moscow’s social values, particularly around religion and sexuality, better reflect the cultural norms than does Western decadence. It also aligns well with the American and European Right. Tucker Carlson has frequently held up Putin as an antidote to America’s wokeness. In France, Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour have both, at various times, hailed Russian values. And Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has styled himself after the Russian dictator, lamenting that his nation is under assault by Western liberalism.

Suggested reading

How Putin enabled the Wagner revolt

By Edward Luttwak

All of this is to Putin’s benefit. The idea that Westerners themselves are validating Putin’s warnings about the moral decay and irreligious apostasy of Nato countries is useful to the Kremlin. The idea that some of those Westerners would come to Russia to fight, even die, for Putin’s political project is even more compelling.

Take Dougan. He told me last year that he planned to help train the Russian-backed separatists. “The Donetsk People’s Republic have captured a bunch of the Javelin missiles sent to them by the American government,” he told me on a video call from Moscow. “When I was in the United States Marine Corps, I happened to be an anti-tank assault man. And my goal is to teach them how to use these missiles to defend themselves… I’m going to give them a way to fight back.” While he declined to confirm if he ever actually went to train them, he did say that, more recently, he had trained with Chechen fighters. (“Those guys are awesome shooters,” he told me this week.)

Suggested reading

How Aleksandr Dugin influences the West

By Aris Roussinos

The West has, for now, opted to ignore this small cohort of Putin propagandists, probably just a few hundred strong. But even that small cohort wields outsize influence. And if it wanted to, could the West act against them? Western states do carry a legal prohibition of sorts on joining a foreign conflict, absent a declaration of war — these laws, however, are selectively and rarely enforced.

In March 2022, American law professor Dakota Rudesill called on the US government to offer some clarity as to who may, or not may not, run afoul of the Neutrality Act in Ukraine. That clarity never came. Rudesill tells me that it is still unclear whether it is legal to travel to Russia to join the fight. Given how much evidence has been posted on social media about these foreign volunteers, he says: “I am confident that a fair number of Americans who have joined the fight on both sides could be charged if the Justice Department as a matter of prosecutorial discretion decided to do so.”

Clearly, the Biden administration is unlikely to target anyone fighting alongside Ukraine. But, Rudesill says, a future administration could break with Biden’s pro-Ukraine stance. Without clarity on the law, he says, the Department of Justice could “start prosecuting Americans who have been resisting the invasion”.

Congress could modernise the law — both by updating the Neutrality Act to reflect modern realities, and by expressly forbidding Americans from joining foreign wars, while also specifically exempting those fighting for Ukraine. (Such a bill, to provide legal cover for the Ukrainian volunteers, has already been introduced in the House of Representatives.) The UK’s Foreign Enlistment Act, and similar legislation in its former colonies, is equally antiquated and selectively enforced, but still in effect.

There are other legal mechanisms to draw on. Western sanction laws are probably the most practical: many of those living and working in Russia are, almost certainly, in violation of them. The European Union has classified the Russian government as a state sponsor of terrorism, and there is a movement afoot to have the US follow suit. Such a designation would come with a spate of legal prohibitions. The United Kingdom is getting ready to classify Wagner Group as a terrorist entity, and other countries are considering following suit. That could mean anyone fighting alongside them could be prosecuted much like those who joined the Islamic State.

Suggested reading

Why Africa welcomed the Wagner Group

By Justin Ling

Ukraine may also insist on trying some of the fighters for war crimes, even if they are American, Canadian or European. There is also some precedent in the country for prosecuting propagandists if they are found guilty of inciting genocide.

When the West was called upon to repatriate its citizens who had joined Islamic State and wreaked havoc in Syria and Iraq, it — by and large — shirked its responsibility. As a result, tens of thousands of foreigners have been left to rot in the Middle East. Some are former combatants, whom, even years later, Western governments are still disinterested in prosecuting. Others are women and children who had no hand in the fighting or brutal violence, and yet many states still refuse to take them back.

With this in mind, Western countries ought to clarify the situations in which their citizens could face prosecution for their participation in Putin’s war. This may, in some cases, be purely academic: they may simply never leave Russia again. But as Yevgeny Prigozhin’s march on Moscow showed, the Russian state may be less stable than we thought. And if the President were to fall, what would become of his useful idiots. Suddenly, that brand new Potemkin village might not look quite so appealing.

But who? There’s evidence that Ruby was a low-level sidekick of the Mafia, so maybe it was the Mafia who shot Kennedy. But why kill Oswald as well? It’s here that my devilishly ingenious theory comes in. There’s no real evidence that the Mob killed the President, but they might have been incensed that someone else had. Not because they had any love for their leader, but because they had intended to assassinate him themselves. After all, they threatened the lives of both Kennedy brothers several times. Before they could get round to it, however, a private entrepreneur called Oswald stepped in and did it instead. By having Oswald bumped off by a known associate of theirs, the Mafia made it look as though Oswald, had he lived, could have revealed their guilt. My theory, then, is that the Mob bumped Oswald off because they didn’t kill Kennedy. They just wanted people to think they had.

Is this true? Probably not. When it comes to the death of JFK, the hardest question is who didn’t do it. There’s a comically long list of possible candidates: Oswald, the CIA, the FBI, the Dallas police, Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy’s driver or his bodyguard, Right-wing Cubans, the Teamsters Union, perhaps (who knows?) a 21-year-old Harrison Ford. Members of QAnon probably believe they were all in it together. As with equality and diversity programmes, genuine conspiracies must leave nobody out.

One shouldn’t be too cynical about conspiracies. After all, as new UnHerd polling has shown, more people in Britain are conspiratorially-minded than aren’t. But it’s true that there isn’t One Big Conspiracy, largely because there doesn’t need to be; it’s also true that people regularly gather together in private to plot the downfall of their enemies. On the whole, however, liberal capitalist states, like dishwashers, work all by themselves (when they work at all). They don’t depend on people meeting in missile-proof bunkers to plot how to stay in power. Modern societies don’t rely on some kind of collective consciousness to keep themselves afloat, partly because modern citizens are atomised rather than collective. In fact, consciousness or belief hardly comes into it. As long as you don’t try to overthrow the state, you can believe pretty much what you like. This is known as liberalism.

Besides, the more individuals are in the know, the more fragile a conspiracy becomes. One reason why the US moon-landing wasn’t a put-up job is that it would have involved too many people, any one of whom could have blown the gaff. And if the truth (as conspirators see it) had got out, the United States would have suffered the most calamitous loss of credibility in its history. Its reputation would have been trashed beyond repair. Fear of being discovered is a primary reason why some events can’t be faked, just as one reason why most politicians try not to lie is not because they are more angelic beings than the rest of us, but because the consequences of being found out mean that it just isn’t worth it.

More from this author

Harry and Meghan's Montecito prison

By Terry Eagleton

If great masses of people maintain a certain belief over long periods of time, one can be fairly sure that there is something in it. This doesn’t mean that the belief in question is true, but it’s unlikely to be complete nonsense either. Myths tend to have a core of truth. For many centuries, everybody thought that the Sun moved around the Earth, which isn’t true; but it was a rational belief all the same, because the evidence seemed to support it. Much the same goes for paranoia. It isn’t true that creatures from Saturn have placed a secret device in your skull to beam your every thought to a control centre in the Glastonbury Tor, but it’s true that a mighty amount of surveillance goes on, much of it secret. Or to put the point more pithily, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean the bastards aren’t out to get you. No civilisation in history has ever spied on itself so relentlessly.

Those who genuinely go off the deep end are those who imagine that we live our lives in private. The idea that what we do is covertly directed by a cabal of obscenely wealthy paedophiles is a delusion — but if you drop the “covertly” and “paedophiles”, it us not far from the truth. We are indeed governed by an elite, but there’s nothing particularly secretive about it. You can see them strolling around Davos or read about them in the newspapers. The phrase “Masters of the Universe” isn’t just a piece of flashy science fiction. There is a sovereign superpower whose presence can be felt in every nook and cranny of the globe, but its name is capital, not the Knights Templar. Like all power, what it needs to sustain itself is knowledge. Knowledge is no longer just what is conveyed in seminars, but priceless stuff which people are prepared to kill for.

Conspiracy theorists are convinced that everything hangs together, which is indeed a symptom of paranoia. For the paranoid, nothing happens by chance. Even a gust of wind is secretly intended. The fact that the Prime Minister has five letters in both his first name and surname must surely be trying to tell us something. Freud thought that the nearest thing to paranoia was philosophy, because philosophers (he was thinking of the Hegelian type) also see connections between apparently unrelated items. There must be some way in which my left foot and the Vatican are secretly interrelated.

Suggested reading

How the Davos elite took back control

By Thomas Fazi

Once again, this isn’t complete nonsense. Even the most trivial of our actions send ripple effects through the thick mesh of social existence, breeding unexpected consequences in unpredictable places. None of our acts is purely our own. Reading this essay may cause you to tear great clumps of hair from your head, thus making you look too frightful to attend the dinner this evening at which you would have been offered the Governorship of the Bank of England. And don’t just blame me: blame the editors, sub-editors, technical assistants and so on. We all had a hand in tearing your hair out. It was a conspiracy, but not a conscious one.

These ripple effects are random. None of them needed to happen, or to happen in exactly the way they did. And this is where they differ from conspiracies. For the conspiratorial mind, nothing whatsoever is random, any more than it is for the paranoid. This is an alarming thought in one sense but a consoling one in another. A world of chance and contingency is a bewildering one, upending our schemes and thwarting our purposes. Far better to imagine that there’s a plot to it all, in both senses of the word, than accept the fact that a lot of things just happen, without any particular rhyme or reason, and that this is part of the price we pay for freedom. This was presumably what Harold Macmillan had in mind when he remarked to a reporter that the hardest thing about trying to run the country was “events, dear boy, events”.

More from this author

The workers were never ignorant

By Terry Eagleton

Ironically, however, American conspiracy theorists are lovers of freedom. “Liberty or death!” ranks among their slogans, and by refusing to wear masks during the Covid pandemic some of them ended up with both. Among other things, conspiracies are symptoms of the anxiety which comes from freedom — from living in the precarious, unpredictable world of late modernity. They are antidotes to the open-endedness of history. Those who spin these yarns are for the most part on the wrong side of that history — those washed up by so-called modernisation, men and women who need someone to blame for their lousy living conditions but who point an accusing finger at fantasises of their own creation.

Conspiracy theories are also reactions to a diffuse, fractured, conflictive society in which there are just too many competing narratives around, so that falling back on a grand narrative which makes sense of everything is profoundly appealing. For a blessed moment, the whole lot falls neatly into place, as an opaque, impossibly complex world becomes luminously simple, purposeful and transparent. Because these myths spring from insecurity, which in turn breeds hatred, the grand narrative in question is almost always a sinister one. Anyone with an eye to how the world is going will have no quarrel with that, even if they don’t believe that Nancy Pelosi is a North Korean spy. They will have no quarrel either with the central assumption of the QAnonites and their ilk — that behind the surfaces of social life there lurks some exceedingly nasty realities, and that the official story is rarely the whole truth of the matter. What you see is most definitely not what you get. The good news is that no conspiracy can be entirely successful, since if it were we wouldn’t know about it.

Wasn’t it strange, he suggested, that after the CIA had failed for years to find Osama bin Laden, somehow a regular camera crew had found his secret hideout and conducted an interview? Bin Laden was a US intelligence asset, Cooper asserted, and something was now afoot. “I’m telling you to be prepared for a major attack!” he declared.

This attack, Cooper asserted, would be blamed on bin Laden. Two and a half months later, two planes flew into the Twin Towers. On that day, Cooper made a number of further predictions: the US would respond with bombs, somewhere or other; and shortly after that, new laws would impose draconian restrictions on the rights of American citizens.

Cooper later made one further forecast: “They’re going to kill me, ladies and gentlemen,” he said. Less than two months later, it happened. Makes you think, doesn’t it? Or perhaps it really was just a case of a far-Right nutjob resisting arrest for fraud. Cooper was certainly eccentric: among many other things, his 1991 book, Behold A Pale Horse — reportedly one of the most shoplifted titles in America, as well as one of the most commonly read in prison — claimed JFK was assassinated to prevent a secret pact with space aliens.

But whether or not his death really was a political assassination, the paranoid, colourful mindset inaugurated by his book is no longer unusual. In the course of what Venkatesh Rao calls “The Great Weirding”, the triumph of digital over print media has brought a sense of reality coming somehow unstuck. In its wake, conspiracy discourse has become so common it barely registers as such. Recent headlines on train derailments in Ohio, Texas, and South Carolina, for example, swiftly coalesced online with the Chinese spy balloon and three other mysterious “lying objects” shot down recently to become a lively new thread in the ever-evolving conspiracy narrative.

More from this series

The truth about conspiracy Britain

By Freddie Sayers

And this mindset isn’t confined to America: according to UnHerd Britain polling this week, 38% of Britons agree that “the world is controlled by a secretive elite”. This rising tide of feral hermeneutics has prompted a great deal of anxious commentary in recent years, as well as a growing corpus of (often themselves highly politicised) censorship regimes and self-appointed organisations dedicated to “fighting disinformation”. But it is a mistake to imagine that myth-making can be always “debunked”, no matter how superficially absurd its claims. And pointing out that conspiracy stories aren’t literally true misses the important sense in which, very often, they are.

I get most of my updates on the conspiracy front from my hairdresser, who is always abreast of the latest twists, from Pizzagate to tortured children in tunnels under Central Park to Joe Biden being a deepfake (you have to look at his ears, apparently). I look forward to our appointments at least as much for her chat as for her skill in civilising my hair. But it would be a gross insult to this intelligent, practical woman to suggest she uncritically views these stories as factually accurate. Rather, they exist in a space that’s neither true nor false, but closer to a mode of thinking that has fallen somewhat out of fashion: allegory.

Today, tales of gods, monsters, and heroism are largely treated as nonsense for kids, or at best confined to the deprecated category of “fantasy fiction”. But prior to the modern world, stories that had both a literal meaning and a secondary one as an extended metaphor — allegories — were a high-status literary form. So much so, in fact, that the cosmos was understood as a kind of allegory, full of secondary meanings written by God.

And you can view conspiracy theories as a kind of crowdsourced allegory: pooled observations about the world, conveyed in story form. This is perhaps easier to see with a bit of historical distance, via an older form of such story: fairy tales. The Grimms’ stories, for example, emerged out of a folk culture profoundly scarred by the Thirty Years’ War: a 17th-century conflict that turned into three hellish decades of rapine, starvation and bloodshed for the peasantry of Central Europe.

Suggested reading

Are you an extremist?

By Terry Eagleton

In this context, Hansel and Gretel makes perfect sense as an only lightly embellished account of the dangers faced by orphaned or abandoned children, in a time of brutal scarcity. It’s probably not true that there was ever a witch with a gingerbread house; but there might well have been cannibalism. (There was in the Russian famine of 1921.)

Thus, fairy tales may be directionally true — even if not literally so. And the same goes for conspiracies as well. It’s probably not true that there are mutilated children and dead babies in tunnels under Central Park, kept so their organs can be harvested by Satanists. The following things, however, are true: firstly, that the Satanic Temple wants to secure abortion rights in America. Secondly, that foetus tissue has been used in medical experimentation, drug development and sometimes transplantation. And thirdly, that many American children have had their bodies amputated based on a view of gender theory whose modern proponents lean ever more enthusiastically into Satanic associations and iconography.

In sum, then: it’s not literally true that there’s a secret conspiracy of child-mutilating Satanists threatening the world. But it’s less that this has no relation at all to reality, than that it represents an allegorical, highly coloured folk-interpretation of data points that — while perhaps unconnected — are real. In this sense, we can view conspiracies as a shout of defiance against a defining characteristic of the “educated” elite worldview: its blanket prohibition on everyday pattern recognition. You don’t have to be well-educated to notice normative patterns in everyday life, and sometimes larger trends too; in fact education is a positive obstacle to noticing — for in the liberal world typically reinforced by university education, normative patterns are dismissed as “stereotypes”. The proper attitude to such stereotypes is firstly to insist that they’re socially imposed and harmful, and, secondly, that they should be eliminated.

Suggested reading

The return of Satanic Panic

By Harry Shukman

And yet, “stereotype accuracy” is one of the most replicable effects in social science. In other words: by and large, at the small scale, folk pattern recognition is on point. And it’s on point, too, in many allegorical narratives that get dismissed as “conspiracy theories”. For example, it’s probably not literally true that the world is controlled by a shadowy elite. But it’s not directionally wide of the mark to notice that the same set of policies keep reappearing, no matter what people vote for. To take one recent example, Britain voted to leave the EU because of widespread objections to the downward pressure exerted by low-skilled migration on domestic wages. But after a brief blip in which migration really did go down and low-skilled wages went up, last year net migration was higher than ever. No one can point to any single factor that seems to have caused it; it’s just somehow, inexplicably gone on happening. Makes you think, doesn’t it?

I’m joking, of course. But the “Great Reset” isn’t a paranoid fantasy either: the WEF website devotes a whole section to it. Central Bank Digital Currencies really do grant governments vast new powers of surveillance and control. The vaccine passport infrastructure assembled during the pandemic really is being touted as a blueprint for future governance. The whole point of the Bilderberg Group is elite collusion, as it is with Davos. The WEF really is proud of having highly-placed members throughout world governments. Underage girls really were trafficked to Epstein Island to provide sexual services, and Epstein was linked to many famous individuals.

I sincerely doubt there are cabals of suit-wearing Dr Evil types, or lizards in human costume, setting out to enslave us all by genetically modifying us, tracking us with microchips, and imprisoning us under “climate lockdowns” to eat mealworm slurry, while distracting the restive masses with UFO stories. But there really are numerous government bodies keen to see advances in mRNA therapies, more centralised digital IDs, further emissions reductions through reduced travel monitored by surveillance and enforced by fines — not to mention top-down pressure to reduce global consumption of animal protein.

Suggested reading

Should we forgive extremists?

By Charlotte McDonald-Gibson

There are (probably) no space aliens involved. Groups such as the WEF are probably not omniscient or omnipotent. But from a pattern-recognising perspective, this is secondary to the directionally accurate sense that the direction of travel is unnervingly post-democratic, in ways that have to do with digital technology, surveillance, biotech, and collusion between government and big business. If, where larger-scale political trends are concerned, this becomes a bit embellished, this isn’t so different from adding a gingerbread house to a plausible 17th-century story of abandoned children narrowly escaping death at the hands of a cannibalistic adult stranger, during a period of widespread famine.

This in turn points to why conspiracies really thrive. It’s not because people are stupid, or gullible, but because allegory is an efficient shorthand for disturbing but indisputably real patterns. For if these patterns form a single narrative, we can go on believing everything could still be induced to make sense; that there actually is someone in charge, even if their plans are nefarious.

And ultimately, this is at least slightly less disturbing than the prospect that the increasingly baroque chaos of 21st-century politics is just happening, without anyone at the helm. For if no one is causing it, that means no one can stop it either. And that is truly frightening.

In the digital age, however, the fresh start is more elusive. The internet is everywhere, and the internet remembers; the person you used to be still lives there, preserved in the form of archived links and deleted-but-screenshotted posts, ready and waiting to dispel any notions you might have had of leaving him behind. And while maintaining a careful separation between the digital self and your actual one can mitigate some of the risk, even the most painstakingly constructed pseudonymous identity inevitably develops a crack or two, through which the real you can be glimpsed — especially if your pseudonymous self is, not to put too fine a point on it, a bit of a flamethrower.

This brings us to a New York Times op-ed titled, “Did the Mother of Young Adult Literature Identify As a Man?”, which was published in late December to widespread consternation. The content of the essay has already been thoroughly dealt with by critics, who alleged that its author, Peyton Thomas, indulged in both contextual misrepresentation of Louisa May Alcott’s writings and no small amount of crude gender stereotyping, to support the illegitimate, retroactive transing of the Little Women author. (Among these was noted feminist critic Katha Pollitt, who in a letter to the editor wrote: “What 19th-century woman with genius and gumption wouldn’t chafe at her restricted life and long for the broad freedoms of manhood?”)

But equally interesting, and largely unremarked-upon, was the reaction to the op-ed by a smaller group — one less outraged by the essay’s content and more profoundly amused that the author was given the chance to write it in the first place. Because while for the average New York Times reader, this essay would have been the first time they encountered Thomas’s work, these commentators — who skewed generally younger and far more online — had been watching Thomas make arguments just like the Alcott one for years on the microblogging site Tumblr, where he was a sometimes controversial figure.

For those not familiar with the early-2010s dynamics of Tumblr: Katherine Dee has described the site, accurately, as the “digital sideshow attraction” from whence much of today’s weirdest and most toxic identitarian political discourse originates. It is important to note, therefore, that most of the drama surrounding Thomas, like most Tumblr controversies generally, is so overwrought, convoluted, and terminally online that it’s both impossible to parse and not worth giving more oxygen to. (For this reason, I’m not linking to it.)

What is worth discussing, however, is how easily Tumblr’s cult-like fandom culture became the default mode of engagement for its adherents, a way to not only participate in fandom but to understand the world. The way discourse functioned on the site, it was a brief step from writing gay fan fiction about, say, Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, to fantasising openly about a same-sex romance between the men who played them, Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman — and then to lashing out publicly at actress Amanda Abbington when she had the audacity to not only be cast as Watson’s love interest, but to be Freeman’s paramour in real life.

More from this author

The paranoia driving office politics

By Kat Rosenfield

Peyton Thomas was a content creator within multiple Tumblr fandoms, and like many young writers, developed a professional career out of his early, more informal posting in a way that made it difficult to leave Tumblr entirely behind. “Lots of writers sort of put their fandom identity to the side when they become professional writers,” Thomas told me by phone. “For me, that’s never been possible, because so many of my first assignments came out of people who’d been reading my Tumblr.”

Curiously, Thomas’s best-known work of fan fiction was one with a real-life analogue that also blurred the lines between reality and fantasy: the same month that Thomas posted a full-length fan fiction screenplay for a Spider-Man movie featuring a bisexual Peter Parker, he also sparked a rumour that Andrew Garfield had been fired from the Spider-Man franchise after two films because he wouldn’t stop pushing for the hero to have a same-sex romance.

In hindsight, Thomas says, he got a bit ahead of himself.

“That was definitely an overstatement, that he was fired because of this. I don’t have any definitive proof, and I didn’t then, that he had been fired for making those comments, or that the entire franchise had collapsed because he made those comments,” he told me. (He did note, accurately, that Garfield felt both constrained by the canonical requirements of the Spider-Man franchise — a 2011 licensing agreement stipulated that the Peter Parker Spider-Man character could only ever be portrayed as a heterosexual white man — and disillusioned by the pressure from Sony to retract his comments about making the hero bisexual.)

But less interesting than the lack of truth in this rumour is the way in which it wasn’t true, how perfectly the story of Garfield’s alleged firing fit within the Tumblr paradigm of disregarding canon (or in some cases, reality itself) in favour of a narrative that is less true but more exciting. Viewed through this lens, the gay Spider-Man fanfic, the Andrew Garfield rumour, and the Louisa May Alcott essay all coalesce into a single category of thing: they are all fantasy, all projection, all the headcanon of a super-fan imagining an alternative reality into existence. The only difference is that the first two things could be more or less written off as internet nonsense, while the latter was deemed worthy of inclusion in the nation’s most prestigious newspaper.

To be as charitable as possible to Thomas, his Alcott essay — like his Spider-Man rumour — is not based on nothing. (Among those presently struggling with the question of how to understand Alcott’s identity through the lens of contemporary gender politics is Louisa May Alcott Society president Gregory Eiselein, who is quoted in Thomas’s essay as saying, “I am certain that Alcott never fit a binary sex-gender model.”) And none of this is to say that having been a Tumblr poster, or even a Tumblr shitposter, should disqualify a person from eventually making a living as a writer or cultural commentator. Many authors working today first began honing their craft as amateur fanfic writers.

Meanwhile, in 2023, there are few young adults who don’t have a discoverable digital footprint dating back to their teens, the content of which should not be held against them, no matter how embarrassing or unsophisticated it might be. Those of us who came of age before the social web may thank the stars that our most cringeworthy adolescent thoughts are confined to the pages of a physical (read: burnable) diary, rather than preserved for all eternity on the internet. Yet it behooves us to recognise that one individual’s trajectory from Tumblr conspiracy theorist to NYT columnist is not substantively different to going back for your 10-year high school reunion and discovering that your lab partner from freshman biology — the one who always seemed to like dissecting frogs a little too much — is now an accomplished neurosurgeon.

Suggested reading

Journalism is being eaten alive by opinion

By Jesse Singal

Rather, I want to question the trajectory whereby an argument like this one — which ultimately hinges less on historical accuracy than the desire of its author that it be true — can make its way into the pages of the New York Times. Partly, this might be down to the existence of a commissioning editor on staff who likes to source their pitches from Twitter, where Thomas went viral last spring with a thread advancing the same thesis ultimately argued in the Alcott essay. But there is something here, too, about the ability of an ultimately half-baked idea to sneak past the gatekeepers of our most storied media institutions.

Much has been made of late over the threat of misinformation, as the public’s faith in American news media has fully split along partisan lines. Those on the Right no longer trust mainstream news, which in turn treats that lack of trust as a threat unto itself: even a casual news consumer has likely been warned about the dangers of QAnon, Russian bots, and the rise of an entire, Right-wing ecosystem dedicated to ensnaring gullible conservatives in an alternative reality made of fake news. But here we have a rare glimpse of how a similarly baseless story can spread beyond the cultish confines of the social justice Left and into the paper of record: as it turns out, even the New York Times will happily launder a narrative into news if it rings the proper, politically expedient bells on a hot-button topic.

In this case, of course, that topic was trans issues, which in addition to being a major front in America’s 2022 culture wars are also lately host to a smaller, internecine conflict between the New York Times news organisation — which has gone against the grain in recent months to report on, for instance, the medical controversy surrounding the use of puberty blockers on trans-identified kids — and its smaller, more ideologically homogenous opinion section. In this environment, something like the Alcott essay isn’t just clickbait; it signals to those readers who were inflamed by the aforementioned reporting that the NYT is still down with the cause. And of course, this willingness to bestow its imprimatur upon a story that is factually flimsy but politically correct is not exclusive to the Gray Lady: in past several years, institutions from The Guardian to Scientific American have allowed embarrassingly bad arguments to be printed in their pages because they promoted a narrative that progressives wish were true.

The truth is that bias-stroking sensationalism has a way of finding purchase in the media on Left and Right alike. Once you notice this, it’s hard to unsee it — as with last week’s explosion of news stories about the dangers (or, on the Right, the noble necessity) of gas stoves. It is just as much a problem with non-frivolous topics as it is with culture war fodder: while the Right-wing press engages in ghoulish, and foolish, speculation attributing this or that recent death to the mRNA vaccines, one recalls that the Left was no less gung-ho in amplifying nonsense stories about Covid denialists in red states gasping “It isn’t real!” as they coughed themselves to death.

If anything, perhaps we should be grateful to the New York Times for advertising that it is as susceptible to such audience capture as any other outlet. Then we might resolve, if we hadn’t already, not to simply believe everything we read.

Recently, the label has made multiple forays into the gothic, not least by mining the aesthetics of climate collapse for several recent shows. (As one women’s magazine enthused: “Balenciaga brought the apocalypse to Paris and we’re here for it.”) So perhaps brand managers expected the disturbing imagery of young kids surrounded by bondage gear to be treated as just another subversive juxtaposition in the service of selling things. This time, however, the bourgeois were not so much thrillingly épaté as absolutely bloody incandescent — because they assumed that childhood itself was being sold.

Internet sleuths quickly tracked down details of an earlier Balenciaga campaign, in which background props had included a Supreme Court ruling on the illegality of child pornography, as well as a book by an artist controversial for depicting tortured children in his work. The two separate campaigns were quickly conflated by commentators, jointly presented as a case of paedophilic imagery gloating lasciviously in plain sight. Some observers went further, interpreting the placing of lettered packing tape in the most recent campaign as spelling out a reference to Baal, the Canaanite god who demanded child sacrifices.

In some quarters of the populist Right, where the legacy of QAnon still looms large, Christmas had come early. Tucker Carlson weighed in, bravely putting his own history of joking about child rape behind him, to connect the incident to groomer discourse and admonish the world to “stop sexualising kids”. Creepy geezer-bro Andrew Tate argued that Balenciaga was being deliberately open and explicit about paedophilic sympathies because the “people who are in charge of these brands, and of the Western world” are “Satanists” who deliberately “tell you what they are doing” in order to avoid karmic retribution for their sins. (Any reflection by Tate on earlier frank admissions of his that “I am absolutely sexist and I’m absolutely a misogynist” went unrecorded.)

Though — of course — I don’t know the truth of what actually happened at Balenciaga, it seems to me that the “deliberately paedophilic” interpretation is probably wrong. But that doesn’t mean the whole thing was an accident. As others have suggested, rather than acting as a direct manifestation of a paedophile conspiracy, it seems more likely that the campaigns were offering knowing nods to the aesthetics of paedophile conspiracies. Viewed in this light, the problem is not so much the imagery but that the proles on the internet hadn’t done a Masters in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths.

Suggested reading

The rise of the liberal groomer

By Mary Harrington

This interpretation is in keeping with the modus operandi of high fashion. The higher the couture, and the more luxurious the brand, the more effort must be made to signal this status to the world. One traditional way to do this is by using hand-embroidered silks and other gorgeous fabrics to make clothes. But a reality-transcending brand image can also be achieved by dressing women up in totally impractical garments they can’t walk or get through doors in, or — as Balenciaga also recently did — by inducing a celebrity such as Kim Kardashian to wear ridiculous facemasks in public on a number of occasions.

As Louise Perry has argued, fears about paedophilia are often viewed by liberals as classically low-status, and associated by them with the “ignorant and credulous working classes”. And so, ironically sneering about low-status cultural fears about paedophiles, in a way only detectable to a few knowing onlookers, is automatically high-status. Job done. Or it would have been, had it not proved understandably impossible for most onlookers to tell the difference between representation and reality.

More from this author

Liberals have a fetish problem

By Kathleen Stock

As with Balenciaga’s attraction to the gothic, the fashion world more generally has long played about with savagery and psychic darkness for the purposes of selling people things they don’t need. In practice this often means glamourising various terrible things done to women. Alexander McQueen’s first two (visually stunning) collections were called “Jack the Ripper and his Victims” and “The Highland Rapes”. A 2007 Dolce & Gabbana ad campaign was highly suggestive of gang rape, and a 2003 Sisley campaign of bestiality between a woman and a bull.

Generally speaking, the fashion industry is littered with pictures of young women with a sexualised, exploited, fetishised, or downright quasi-paedophilic vibe. And female consumers apparently lap it up — perhaps because they tell themselves, accurately, that promoting abusive sex is not the direct point. As with everything else in the fashion world, nothing is positively asserted, but only referred to obliquely or quoted in order to generate interest in the clothes.

Yet when you look at some of the blank-eyed skeletal young models who still tend to be preferred by designers, it’s impossible to maintain that the casual brutality dished out to women in the representational realm of fashion doesn’t have consequences for the real one. Models are treated by the fashion world as living dolls you can pick from a book purely on the basis of appearance, then dress them up, choose their poses, control their food intake, and fly them around the world to serve you, until you don’t want them anymore. Granted, not every model is skinny or young these days, but even those who aren’t are just as heavily objectified — every personalised aspect of them being diminished to a commercially favourable appearance, interchangeable with some other commercially favourable appearance, should the originally-booked girl have a breakdown or get a breakout.

But at least most models are adults, technically anyway. For me, an under-explored aspect of the Balenciaga scandal is the apparent fact that parents somewhere have let their very young children be photographed in these campaigns. It is bad enough to represent grown adults as slack-jawed, vacant children, but a lot worse to turn children into slack-jawed, vacant little adults. Generally speaking, I marvel in horror at parents who use their children to make money by modelling or acting in adverts. No matter how much fun children allegedly have doing it, or how much money goes into their trust funds because of it, there is nothing about having one’s appearance objectified by strangers for money that’s compatible with healthy childhood development.

Suggested reading

What's wrong with lingerie?

By Kat Rosenfield

And of course, it’s not just commercial modelling. Famous for admonishing us against using other humans as mere means to our ends, Kant also warned that “parents cannot regard their child as, in a manner, a thing of their own making”. Then again, he wasn’t on Insta. The internet is full of influencers using their own children for likes and clicks. If social media has turned many of us into narcissists, then it seems to have turned our children into narcissistic extensions of ourselves — only there to say something flattering about who we are. A generation of kids are growing up, made supremely conscious of how their bodies and faces look as they go about their daily lives, before they really know anything else about themselves. And we made them that way.

Moral panics get off the ground partly because they pick up on unconscious forces genuinely rippling through a culture. It doesn’t seem to me a coincidence that there’s increasing prurient interest in paedophilia and grooming at the moment, when at the same time there have never been so many culturally acceptable ways to objectify your own child. Paedophilia — which of course exists, and nobody should pretend different — involves the egregious and permanently life-changing treatment of a living human child as a sexual object. But there are subtler ways to use children as means to adult ends. We can sign them up to a modelling agency. We can put them in a beauty pageant. We can upload their pictures with amusing captions on Facebook, in a way that makes us look like good parents.

So the original fear about Balenciaga — that they are selling kids — was perhaps not entirely wrong. If not kids, then collectively we are at least selling childhoods. And the hideous teddy bear fetish bags highlighted in the doomed ad campaign now seem to me to be an uncannily apt symbol of what we are doing. A much-beloved figure, originally invested with so much innocence, joy, and love, now turned into something to be used.

Held on 17 September outside the Bank of England, the demonstration was pithily titled the “Nationwide Rally for Freedom: For Truth, Justice & Freedom”, and featured speeches by Piers Corbyn and David Icke. It was, notionally at least, against Covid jabs — but some attendees had their own agendas.

The couple introduced themselves as Lee and Morag, and explained the message behind their jumpers. It refers to Satanic Ritual Abuse, and it imagines that devil-worshipping paedophiles operate a trafficking network that kidnaps tens of thousands of children every year in order to ritualistically rape, torture and murder them.

It goes, of course, all the way to the top. Believers in the various iterations of SRA think that the court system has been paid-off to separate children from their parents, and that these kids are smuggled to remote country estates via vast underground tunnels so that senior figures in the British establishment can dismember them in grotesque rituals. “It’s going on, 100%,” said Lee.

Later in the rally, I found Piers Corbyn marching alone, shouting a protest chant through his megaphone. I asked him what he thought about SRA. “It’s real,” he said. “It’s happening. We ought to press on talking about it.”

SRA is the conspiracy theory that refuses to die. An American import, it arrived here in the Eighties and Nineties, and became accepted in some circles as gospel truth. The NSPCC even gave a press conference in 1990 alleging that mothers were handing over their newborn babies to be sacrificed in occult rituals. Therapists, social workers, and writers began spreading sensational claims: children being hung upside-down by hooks so their organs could be cut out; women having their foetuses aborted, carved up and eaten. It’s hard to gauge how many people in the UK today believe in SRA, but one well-known activist, a retired police officer named Jon Wedger, has 36,000 subscribers on YouTube.

It sounds horrific, but so do plenty of made-up things. Rosie Waterhouse, an investigative journalist who researched SRA claims for the Independent on Sunday, found that there has never been any evidence to substantiate them: “No bodies, no bones… no bloodstains. Nothing.”

But try telling that to Lee and Morag. The couple frequently go to Hampstead in north London, where, in 2014, a group of parents was falsely accused of running a satanic paedophile ring that tortured babies to death in the local McDonald’s. For years, these parents and their children have been hounded by conspiracy theorists. When I asked Morag what she and Lee do in Hampstead, she gave a startling response. “Harassment,” she said, laughing. “We go around harassing people. We know the families. They shit themselves.”

Suggested reading

Are you an extremist?

By Terry Eagleton

I’ve researched conspiracy theorists of all stripes for my website, Scout, and I’m continually struck by how many share the common denominator of antisemitism, accusing Jews of malign, behind-the-scenes influence. Jewish people were not the focus of SRA activism in the Nineties, but today that seems to have changed. This January, an SRA campaigner, who cannot be named for legal reasons, organised a rally targeting the Rothschilds, whom she called “the most powerful, vile family in the world”. It was held at Waddesdon Manor, the Buckinghamshire estate owned by Ferdinand de Rothschild, a 19th-century banker from the Jewish finance dynasty, and 50 people turned up to accuse the family of hunting children for sport.

Back at the London march, Lee told me about how “Khazarian Jews” (a conspiracy theory about a powerful Jewish cabal) are ultimately responsible for satanic abuse. Later, a campaigner named Grant told me that abducted children are transported through secret tunnels that run underneath the Rothschild & Co bank.

This may sound like a load of dismissible basement crankery, but accusations of satanic abuse have real consequences. In 2020, a campaigner named Wilfred Wong kidnapped a child in Anglesey, claiming he was a victim of satanic abuse in need of rescue. Wong held a knife to the throat of a foster carer while an accomplice snatched the eight-year-old boy from a car. The child was bundled into a waiting vehicle: the plan was to drive to an airport and take him out of the country. Police stopped the car 150 miles away in Northamptonshire and the boy was safely recovered. Wong is now serving a 22-year prison sentence, but his work in the SRA movement continues to inspire followers.

One of those followers is Susan Fownes, who seems to be a key player in the movement. She has set up an organisation called Pacha House in the Highgate area of Birmingham, which has become a hub for activists campaigning against satanic abuse. At Pacha House, Fownes organises conferences and activist get-togethers. She rents it from Birmingham City Council, which gives spaces in the former Quaker Friends’ Institute to community groups. Pacha House is not a registered charity, although it is considering an application to the Charity Commission.

Suggested reading

Should we forgive extremists?

By Charlotte McDonald-Gibson

I wanted to understand what was going on at Pacha House, but having seen Fownes’s Facebook posts about her distrust of the “MSM”, I was certain that she wouldn’t respond to an ordinary interview request. So I got in touch under a pseudonym, identifying myself as a potential donor, and she invited me to visit.

Pacha House is set in a crumbling Victorian mansion. On the surface, it looks no different from any other ramshackle community project: there’s a kitchen garden, a room filled with art supplies, a study with an old computer. It fits with the wholesome image that Fownes is keen to project. “Providing space for seeding initiatives for holistic living,” reads the aims of Pacha House on her Facebook page. “Advocating wellbeing through the common language of nourishment and nature.”

However, this appears to be cover for Pacha House’s real purpose: campaigning against ritual abuse. Fownes told me she first became wary about SRA after seeing the same young mothers on her estate pushing prams containing different babies. “And you start to wake up to the fact that these girls are delivering babies,” she said, referring to the conspiracy theory from the Nineties that claimed women were being used like broodmares to provide infants for sacrifice.

Fownes has posted Facebook videos in support of Wilfred Wong and invited “survivors of SRA” to come to Pacha House. Sharing a video of one SRA influencer, she wrote: “We are debating these themes and others that affect the wellbeing of our communities and children in Pacha House’s Knowledge Library, Fridays and Saturdays.” On her website, Fownes has shared (and since deleted) a list of celebrities, politicians and other public figures baselessly accused of ritualistic abuse and murder.

Suggested reading

The men who watch gore porn

By Simon Cottee

During our conversation, Fownes suggested that she may have misled Birmingham City Council about Pacha House’s true purpose as an SRA campaign hub. Advising me to set up a sister operation, Fownes said: “I wouldn’t use the word ‘front’, I would say ‘set up a community service project, community engagement’, all of that, but you know between yourselves why you’re really there. And just allow it to grow.” In dealing with the council, she said: “Don’t talk about SRA, don’t talk about child abuse, none of that. Say you want to do a community project… but your real intention is to create the space for people to talk about what’s going on.”

Fownes boasted that councils “can’t really refuse” an application, and indicated that Pacha House was beyond scrutiny. “We’re a private club, so it’s none of their damn business,” she said. “We’re not doing anything wrong: we pay our rent, we look after the space that they have not looked after.”

But the most surprising revelation was yet to come: Pacha House, an organisation devoted to eliminating the apparent scourge of ritual abuse, has itself been accused of putting children at risk by inviting men convicted of sexual assault onto their premises.

On 25 June, Fownes hosted an event at Pacha House, and invited a fellow activist called Jane Kelly. Kelly brought her son with her, a man named Stelios Andreas Anatselopoulos, who was jailed for six years in 2014 after taking four children hostage, punching two of them and sexually assaulting a girl.

The incident led some activists to split from Pacha House. Maria Clarke, an online paedophile hunter who was briefly associated with the organisation, said she left after learning that Anatselopoulos attended the meeting. “How can you let a man convicted of child sex abuse in?” she said.

Suggested reading

The Shamima Begum delusion

By Simon Cottee

In my meeting with Fownes, she brought up the Anatselopoulos incident without my prompting. She insisted she was unaware of his conviction, and that while children and parents do come to Pacha House, none were present when he visited. “I was absolutely shocked that I had someone on our premises who had a sexual assault conviction on a girl,” she said. “I was furious.”

However, during the afternoon I spent with Fownes last month, there was a knock at the door, and she excused herself from the library to answer it. When she returned, she explained: “That was a guy who comes in. I know he has a previous conviction for sexual assault, which was a few years ago, but as long as there’s no children here I let him in.” Fownes continued: “His personality has changed such a lot,” she said. “I explained to him from the beginning, if there are children here you can’t be here, I’ll have to refuse you entry, but Tuesdays and Fridays you can eat here with us.”

Fownes, without a hint of self-awareness, told me: “When you label someone as a paedophile, you’re actually putting them at risk of harm.” If only the same courtesy could be applied when it comes to accusing innocent people of satanic abuse.

Suggested reading

Ukraine has split the far-Right

By Charlotte McDonald-Gibson

When I put this Birmingham City Council, it responded that it expects Pacha House to abide by its safeguarding rules. “The city council takes its duties under the no-platform policy seriously,” said a spokesperson, “and if presented with evidence that this policy is being breached we would look to take appropriate steps, depending on the circumstances.”

Fownes did not respond to multiple requests for comment. And I’m still uncertain what drives her. But the researcher Karen Douglas says people can turn to conspiracy theories when they feel anxious, uncertain and powerless, typically when the obstacles of life upset their equilibrium. I’ve interviewed plenty of hardcore conspiracy theorists who mention their unhappy stints in the army, their alcoholism, and their lost custody battles.

Contrasted with this, believing in SRA offers a reassuringly simple view: shadowy satanic elites are secretly responsible for the wickedness of this world. Perhaps fighting back, even if that just means standing on a north London pavement to yell at people, is one way to feel powerful. As Morag told me at the protest: “I’ve always been a rebel.” Turning to her partner Lee, she added: “We’re freedom fighters, just the two of us together.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene and Madison Cawthorn have only been members of Congress for a little over a year, but in that short time they have earned themselves reputations as hateful bogeymen for Democrats, embarrassing annoyances, if not worse, to many Republican colleagues and renegade heroes to others in the GOP base. As the midterms near, they are also test cases for the appeal of their extreme style of politics. Might these black holes of political attention collapse on themselves?

Far-Right and far-out, Greene’s latest high-profile indiscretion was to appear at a white supremacist conference hosted by Nick Fuentes. A straightforwardly racist, anti-semitic Holocaust denier, Fuentes introduced Greene by asking the crowd to give “a round of applause to Russia”. The appearance — notwithstanding Greene’s subsequent insistence that it was an innocent mistake and that she had no idea who Nick Fuentes was — lacked the darkly eccentric draw of some of her previous outlandish statements, such as the one about Rothschild-owned space lasers causing Californian wildfires. Greene has been stripped of her committee assignments by the Democratic-led House. She has not, however, been formally censured by her own party, and is proudly endorsed by Donald Trump.

By contrast, Cawthorn’s problem isn’t kooky or noxious views — not that he doesn’t hold them. A few weeks ago, he had called Volodymyr Zelenskyy “a thug” and the Ukrainian government “evil”. But his antics have tended to antagonise fellow Republicans in a way that Greene’s have not. More recently, he embarrassed his colleagues (and amused the rest of us) during a podcast appearance in which he claimed to have encountered rampant cocaine use and orgy invitations among the Washington establishment. Tellingly, it was his characterisation of Washington as a depraved Gomorrah that provoked the sharper reaction from House Leader Kevin McCarthy and other senior Republicans.

But does any of this come at an electoral cost? Or will this pair of outrage-hunting political influencers get re-elected in spite of their fringe beliefs?

For partisan-minded Democrats, justice can only be served by one of their own. And so gullible donors fill the coffers of Democratic would-be opponents of the Greenes and Cawthorns who stand approximately zero chance of winning in their heavily Republican districts. One example of these well-funded knights in shining armour is a black veteran in a cowboy hat. Marcus Flowers wants to “hold Marjorie Taylor Greene accountable” in the south-western corner of Georgia she represents and has raised more than $4.5 million to do so: an absurdly high figure for a House seat which FiveThirtyEight estimates has a 45-point Republican lean. Greene herself has raised similarly silly amounts, exploiting her national anti-hero status to rake in $7.5 million since the last election.

If Greene is to be defeated, it will be in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District Republican primary on 24 May. Here, those lining up to do the deed are less appealing to the terminally online liberals wasting their money on Democrats like Flowers. A donor interested solely in making sure Greene is not re-elected would give not to Flowers, but to Jennifer Strahan. She is the most serious challenger — but, according to the most recent campaign finance disclosure, has just $60,332 in cash to take that opportunity.

More from this author

California's progressives are in retreat

By Oliver Wiseman

As was clear in a recent interview, Strahan, a business owner, is no less conservative than Greene, although her promise of dutiful, low-key representation of her voters in Washington contrasts with Greene’s national celebrity.“Representative Greene does not own conservatism,” Strahan tells me. “A lot of people in our district share similar beliefs, but they also want someone who is fighting for the people…. [Greene] is not usually in the district. She is off fundraising and doing other things that you’d expect to see in a typical politician.”

“The one thing I want to restore to this position is that it is about service, not being a social media celebrity,” she says. A noble goal, but one that, as the fundraising figures suggest, might be misaligned with the incentive systems of 21st-century American politics.

As for Cawthorn, his notoriety has cost him endorsements that matter in North Carolina’s 11th District, a mostly rural western part of the state that includes rural Blue Ridge mountain communities as well as affluent (and Democratic-voting) Asheville. Thom Tillis, a Senator from North Carolina, has endorsed one of Cawthorn’s challengers, a state senator called Chuck Edwards who, like Strahan in Georgia, promises low-key dependability rather than attention-seeking. Yet Cawthorn’s toughest challenger could prove to be Michele Woodhouse, a former district chair who is running as an avowedly “America First” alternative. She describes herself as a former Cawthorn backer exasperated by his reckless style.

More from this author

Parents are the new political tribe

By Oliver Wiseman

Cawthorn’s bigger problem may not be his national infamy, but his lack of political nous. Last year, he toyed with switching seats and seeking election in North Carolina’s newly drawn 13th District, rather than the 11th. When a court ordered the district’s borders be redrawn, Cawthorn changed his mind — more the actions of a career politician than a man-of-the-people outsider.

His amateurishness was also on display as he handled the fallout of his “coke and orgies” claims last week, apologising to colleagues, offering unhelpful clarifications and blaming the liberal media for the whole thing. But Cawthorn still has one big thing going for him: the support of Donald Trump. He will speak alongside the former president at a rally in North Carolina this weekend.

By neat coincidence, the week that started with Cawthorn’s claims about Washington debauchery ended with the return of a familiar face to the political fray: Sarah Palin, who more than a decade ago helped to reignite the culture wars in which the likes of Cawthorn and Greene now do ferocious daily battle. “America is at a tipping point,” she said in a statement announcing a bid for a vacant Alaskan congressional seat. “I knew I had to step up and join the fight.”

Elected office was always incidental to Palin’s celebrity. She was Governor of Alaska for just two and a half years. After her vice-presidential bid made her a conservative star and a global punchline — not that she ever seemed to mind the jokes — the administration of Alaskan government didn’t seem quite so exciting. She resigned in 2009, not even seeing out her first term, let alone seeking re-election.

Suggested reading

The fall of Seattle

By T.A. Frank

As many have observed, Palin’s rise was an important waypoint on the journey that brought America to the Trump era, and tribute acts like Greene and Cawthorn. By today’s standards, the “going rogue” brand pushed by the no-nonsense hockey mom from Walisa seems positively wholesome. And to revisit the outrage it generated feels a bit like watching those clips of Fifties prudes panicked about the damage Elvis Presley’s gyrating hips might be doing to teenage girls’ minds.

If Palin was a politician for the reality-TV era, Cawthorn and Greene are built for the Instagram age: political influencers who thrive in a fractured media landscape by delivering a more potent, concentrated product to a segmented audience. But as well as being a trial of that offering’s wider electoral appeal, this year’s midterms could also be a test of whether Cawthorn or Greene need a House seat to remain in the political fray. One suspects that space will be made for either of them in the conservative-entertainment world if they find themselves out of a job.

Palin, for instance, had fame, fortune and influence after 2008 without having to worry about the voters. Of course, a former member of Congress might not have the draw of a former vice-presidential candidate, but Cawthorn and Greene are evidence that notoriety matters more than seniority. The challenge, whether in Congress or not, is to stay relevant. Palin managed it without elected office. For a while. But now here she is, once again seeking the votes of her fellow Alaskans. Rather than serving as a model, perhaps that should be a warning to those fringe Republicans flirting with the electoral defeat in pursuit of political stardom.

In the aftermath, Donald Trump was impeached by House of Representatives, but acquitted by the Senate. The social media companies were not so lenient. The 45th President of the United States was de-platformed by Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. 

The chaotic end of Trump’s presidency provided a pretext, though, for a much wider purge of anything deemed to fall under the category of conspiracy theory or misinformation. This week the Republican congresswoman, Majorie Taylor Greene, had her Twitter account permanently suspended; and Joe Rogan who has had content removed by YouTube.  

The attack on conspiracy theory — and the power of the elites to define it as such — is a dangerous one. And not just because of the threat it poses to free speech and the growing influence of big tech that it points out. It’s also because conspiracy theories are an understandable — and sometimes useful — response to a confusing world. To repress this very human instinct risks doing more harm than good.

That’s not to say that this mode of thought is never pathological. But if the conspiracy theorist is obsessive or hateful, the problem is the obsession and the hate — vices which can apply to any belief system.

The trouble is, many conspiracies and cover-ups do exist. And they’d never be uncovered if no one theorised about them. 

So as well as de-pathologising conspiracy theories as a concept, we need to understand conspiracy theorists as a group of people. Most of them are quite ordinary. And, according to recent UK-based research from Ipsos, there are a lot of them. Asked about three conspiracy theories randomly assigned from a list of 11, half the people surveyed considered at least one theory to be “plausible”, with 20% endorsing two or three. 

Therefore, if you want to drive conspiratorial thinking out of society, you’re up against millions of your fellow citizens— not just a few fanatics. Of course, one could argue that’s all the more cause for a crackdown. How can we tolerate a situation in which whole swathes of the population believe in crazy stuff? Except that most of them don’t believe it. Not really. 

For a start, there’s a huge variation in the extent to which different conspiracy theories are accepted. The theory considered the most plausible — with 40% of those asked agreeing — was that “Princess Diana’s death in a car crash was not accidental”. In contrast, the notion that “the COVID-19 vaccine is a cover for implanting traceable microchips” got the thumbs up from just 4% of respondents and the allegation that “5G mobile phone towers are responsible for the spread of COVID-19” a mere 2%.

What do people mean when they say that they find a conspiracy theory plausible, though? What do the Diana conspiracy theorists truly believe? That she was literally assassinated? In some cases, yes. But for most of the 40% it’s probably something much less extreme — like blaming the media for hounding the princess at every turn. 

Suggested reading

Could you spot a conspiracy theorist?

By Matthew Sweet

The researchers found “a high overlap” between those who consider a conspiracy theory plausible and those who consider it “not strictly accurate but a reasonable challenge to the official explanation”, which is telling. It’s not so much that they believe the conspiracy, but that they’re using it to express their doubts about the institutions that tell us what we ought to believe.

Ipsos asked about trust in various kinds of institutional authority. While more than 40% of respondents considered media and political institutions to be “untrustworthy”, the corresponding figures for scientific and public health organisations were much lower — just 3% and 6%. It’s clearly no coincidence that the Covid conspiracy theories had the least public support.  

The lesson here is that those in authority would do better to make themselves more worthy of trust than to wage epistemic war on the public. For most people who indulge in them, conspiracy theories are not about dogmatism, but uncertainty.

As human beings, doubt comes naturally to us. Rational analysis may persuade us to think a certain way about a situation, but inevitably we’ll have irrational thoughts about it too — including secret fears and sneaking suspicions. And why not? Until a situation becomes clear it pays to have multiple, perhaps contradictory, ideas about it. Even if our gut reactions prove unfounded, we’re bound to have them anyway. This isn’t to say that we should allow the emotional, instinctual side of our nature to dominate, but to repress it completely would be just as unhealthy. 

Suggested reading

How France fell for QAnon

By John Lichfield

I’d argue that the equivalent applies at a collective level. Though a society doesn’t have a mind like a person does, it does have what Emile Durkheim called a “collective consciousness” composed of a shared set of understandings. Not everyone thinks the same thoughts about everything, of course — a non-totalitarian society makes room for multiple interpretations of reality. Nevertheless, through mechanisms such as democratic elections or the price setting function of the market place, decisions can be collectively arrived at. 

Conspiracies theories are part of this bubbling mix of interpretations. At the social level, they’re equivalent to the stray thoughts, nagging doubts, daydreams and nightmares that individuals experience. As such, they need to be talked about, not repressed — taken seriously, if not always literally.

They might, after all, turn out to be true. Consider the origin of the Covid pandemic. The idea that the virus escaped from a Chinese laboratory was once repudiated as delusional, not to say xenophobic. Fortunately, there were some investigators willing to question the established view. Though not yet proven, the lab leak hypothesis is now taken seriously. At the very least, it has focused much-needed attention on the perils posed by high-risk research.

Just because conspiracy theories aren’t true, that doesn’t mean they don’t serve a purpose. There’s no conspiracy theory — no matter how obscure — that doesn’t speak to some unmet need to make sense of the world. 

A deliberately silly example is the bizarre claim that Paul McCartney died in 1966 and was replaced by a look-alike. What possible psychological need might that satisfy? Well, how about the desire to comprehend the astonishing pace of cultural change over the course of the Sixties? Like the Beatles themselves, the world looked completely different at end of the decade from how it did at the beginning. I don’t think that McCartney’s supposed death and substitution provides any sort of useful explanation, but it does reduce a question of unfathomable complexity to a human scale. 

Suggested reading

Are the conspiracy cranks a little bit right?

By Gavin Haynes

The same psychological forces are at work in Covid conspiracy theories. Take the notion that vaccinations are being used to inject us with tracking technology. On one level it’s obvious nonsense, but on another it’s symbolic of the vastly expanded capacity of the state to monitor and control our movements. Even if we believe that these measures were justified, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t also be horrified by what’s been done to us. A necessary evil is still an evil. 

Our collective sense of horror needs an outlet. Conventional politics has done a poor job of providing one — as has the mainstream media. So, instead, the trauma bubbles to the surface in the form of conspiracy theories. Which is why I worry about the actions of the social media companies. Who are they to edit the collective consciousness?

They may imagine that they’re shutting down opportunities for charlatans and demagogues. But what I fear they’re really doing is closing off a safety valve.

The Egyptian pyramids had been built by extraterrestrial beings, he said. The aliens were still among us, secretly running the world. Their existence was being covered up by the political and business “elites”.

France might be the country of Descartes, one of the fathers of logic and rationalism. But it is second only to the United States among western countries in its vulnerability to fantastic and fact-free deviations from conventional wisdom. Only three years ago, one survey found that 79% of French adults believed in at least one elaborate conspiracy theory. One in three believed in four of them.

What exactly did they believe? More than half said that they thought the CIA had assassinated President John F. Kennedy, while a similar proportion suggested that the French government was working with the pharmaceutical industry to conceal the fact that all vaccines are dangerous. One in three French people thought that the AIDS virus had been “created in a laboratory and tested on Africans before spreading to the rest of the world”. One in five thought that the “Americans never reached the moon”.

Against this background, it is no surprise to discover that the preposterous but destructive QAnon conspiracy — that Satan-worshipping, liberal elites are trafficking children into sexual slavery and Donald Trump has been sent by God to stop them — is spreading steadily in France.

Earlier this month, Christian Maillaud, a former gendarme and paratrooper, was arrested in the Loire département of central France and accused of trying to foment a military insurrection. Maillaud, 53, also known as “Stan” or the “white Zorro” by his followers, is a leader of the “Conseil national de transition”, which has adopted “Qanoniste” ideology and wants to destroy the Satanist politicians and institutions that (he claims) control France. “He wants to bring together the extreme Right and the extreme Left, the Gilets Jaunes and various conspiracy theorists to create a new world,” explained the local state prosecutor, Eric Neveu.

Maillaud may or may not be a dangerous person. Most probably he is harmless but crazy. He is, however, a symptom of a wider pattern of half-plausible conspiracy theorising — “complotisme” in French — which some people, including the Government, fear may eventually pose a threat to French democracy.

“It’s become a big issue in this country,” says Professor Antoine Bristielle, a researcher into conspiracy theories for the Fondation Jean-Jaurès, “even if we’re not yet at the level of the United States where 56% of Republicans say they believe in QAnon.”

“The problem is that people who come to believe in one conspiracy theory tend to swallow all of them… You see an increasing number of people, not just in the US but also in France, who reject the legitimacy of elections… That could cause a big problem for the Presidential elections here next year.”

Rejection of politicians is one thing; rejection of democracy and democratic institutions is another. Criticism of successive governments is, of course, perfectly normal — as are suggestions that French governments sometimes cover up the truth. Certainly, French voters have had plenty of legitimate gripes against their political leaders in the last four decades.

More from this author

Macron's vaccine passport gamble

By John Lichfield

But the last few years have revealed a pattern of contempt and paranoia in France which goes beyond political opposition or traditional populism — and plunges into elaborate theories of treachery and plots against “The People”. Some of the theories are modern (they blame Bill Gates, Big Tech and Big Pharma) and others are very old (it’s the Jews). All are rapidly propagated online, but they cannot be explained by social media alone.

The Covid pandemic — a phenomenon imperfectly understood and explained by “official sources” — has been an El Dorado for conspiratorial thinking in every country. But France seems to be more susceptible than most.

The original Gilets Jaunes movement of 2018 was partly a rational revolt by rural France against years of limp government and the insolent success of the big cities. It was also accelerated by absurdly inflated allegations, spread on social media, of stolen elections and self-enriching politicians. (“Brigitte Macron gets 500,000 Euros a year from the tax-payer,” was one of the more popular claims.)

Over the past six weeks, it has been much the same with the street demonstrations against the French government’s proposed “health pass”. Some of the protesters have reasonable, or at least rational, arguments against rapidly developed vaccines or assaults on personal freedom. Others carry banners accusing capitalism (Big Pharma) or “the Jews” of exploiting or even inventing the Covid pandemic.

More from this author

Macron's humiliating dilemma

By John Lichfield

At the same time, the growing QAnon movement in France has been encouraged by — and also now threatens to supplant — more traditional and indigenous purveyors of paranoia.

Alain Soral, a former official of the far-Right Rassemblement National, runs a website called Égalité et Réconciliation, which has tried for years to unite white working class people and migrants with extravagant allegations of a Jewish plot to control the world. He is closely associated with the comedian, Dieudonné, who has several convictions for making anti-Semitic jokes and baseless accusations.

Several months ago, Alain Soral embraced QAnon. So did what’s left of the once-great French evening newspaper, France-Soir, now reduced to a website without journalists which propagates conspiracy theories about Covid. It is supplemented by another website, DéQodeurs, which spreads QAnon fantasies.

The people who visit these sites — les Qanonistes  — are described by a French police investigator as a sponge for a range of other conspiracy theories and theorists. “They exist in a plot-obsessed bubble which includes radical Gilets Jaunes and Covid-deniers,” my source said. “Their profile now overlaps closely with the word of Dieudonné and Soral”.

One of the leading online propagators of QAnonist ideology in France is a man who calls himself Leonard Sojli, who posts an online debate each week featuring conspiracy-theorists of the extreme Left and extreme nationalist and racist Right. The “debate” also sometimes extends to the most abstruse QAnon allegations, such as a “conspiracy” by the satanic “elites” to extract the blood of children to create an anti-ageing drug called “adrenochrome” (actually just a form of  adrenalin).

Suggested article

The narcissistic fall of France

By Michel Houellebecq

Tristan Mendès France, a French writer and filmmaker who studies and combats conspiracy theories, says the French branch of the “Q” movement remains marginal but is still “toxic”.

And it has gained a foothold. Marie Peltier, a Belgian writer and lecturer on “complotisme” believes the proliferation of outlandish conspiracy theories in all democratic countries is a symptom of a 21st century crisis of identity and belief. “The old 20th century ideas (both political and religious) no longer have the same hold on people,” she said. “We are struggling to find a new overarching narrative which brings people together. Conspiracy theories fill the vacuum.”

Antoine Bristielle makes a similar point. He says the key is the collapse of confidence in democratic institutions — from parliaments to the media. “There is a kind of logic in all this,” he says. “If you’ve lost confidence in such institutions, you are no longer ready to believe what they tell you and you seize on alternative narratives which reject and blacken the institutions.”

There is, however, a French exceptionalism – even in conspiratorial thinking. In the United States, conspiracy theories are mostly associated with devout religious belief and radical forms of patriotism. They are mostly confined to the far political Right.

In France, they range from the far-Left to the far-Right and sometimes unite them. They are a symptom of the collapse of widespread religious belief and observance, but also the collapse in support for traditional political ideologies and parties from Communism to socialism and Gaullist conservatism.

The relationship between populism and “complotisme” also differs from country to country. In the United States, Donald Trump aligned himself with and even promoted belief in “plots against the people”. In Britain, the Johnson government – though not always scrupulous with the truth – does not indulge in such fantasies. It promotes other populist themes – Brexit, migration – to help retain the support of many of the kinds of people attracted to wilder, anti-establishment narratives in France.

Suggested article

Why we love to hate the French

By Ed West

In France, even the “official” extremes of far Right and far Left – represented by Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon – have been wrong-footed by the rise of conspiratorial populism such as the Gilets Jaunes and parts of the Anti-Pass Movement. They try to shun the wilder theories while praising the protests. That is a difficult balance to maintain. The “complotistes” increasingly reject them as part of the “political establishment”.

In the United States, large parts of the population now appear to exist in separate realities. France is not yet at that point. But as Antoine Bristielle points out, France is also divided between people who may be critical of the Government but accept the democratic system and those who believe that elections and democratic institutions are a farce or a plot.

Their numbers are perhaps not yet great enough to undermine or skew next year’s presidential election. But the longer-term trend is, as the junior interior minister Marlène Schiappa says, “deeply worrying”.

Perhaps, then, we should be more open-minded about other conspiracy theories, particularly those about the so-called “Great Reset”. On one level, the Great Reset doesn’t count as a conspiracy at all — because it isn’t a secret. Rather, it’s a very public initiative by the World Economic Forum (better known as “Davos”, the usual location of its highly-exclusive annual conference).

Last year, the WEF launched the Great Reset as a response to the Covid pandemic. “To improve the state of the world,” it announced, “the World Economic Forum is starting The Great Reset initiative.”

It was, in effect, a desperate attempt to keep itself relevant in the middle of a global disaster that years of Davos-style prognostication did little to prevent. Still, having carefully considered the situation, the various Great Reset authors — including WEF chairman Klaus Schwab — clearly believe that what the world needs now is even more of Davos and everything it represents.

Indeed, according to Schwab, the pandemic is “a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world to create a healthier, more equitable, and more prosperous future.” Likeminded politicians such as Justin Trudeau have also described the pandemic as an opportunity — further arousing the suspicions of conspiracy theorists.

Suggested reading

Why we should welcome the lab leak hypothesis

By Bret Weinstein

In its most extreme form, the imagined conspiracy is that mass vaccination is being used to do something truly horrible to us — mass sterilisation, for instance. The less extreme form of the conspiracy is that those in power are exaggerating, or at least exploiting, the dangers of the pandemic in order to advance an ideological agenda. For instance, in the US, the right-wing Heartland Institute claims that “global elites are using the ‘existential threat’ of climate change to advance socialism under the guise of a Great Reset of the economy.”

Might these critics have a point? Is the vision set out by the WEF in 2020 now translating into a programme of interference by big government and big business?

According to Klaus Schwab, the Great Reset has three main components — the first of which is to “steer the market toward fairer outcomes”, for instance by governments improving their coordination on “tax, regulatory, and fiscal policy”. And guess what? The leaders of the G7 countries have just agreed a deal to impose a minimum level of business taxation on multinational corporations.

The second component is to “ensure that investments advance shared goals”. This includes major public sector spending programmes — which are now underway in Europe and America. As for private finance, that’s swinging behind Great Reset goals in a major way — with companies like BlackRock making huge investments in the low carbon economy.

The third, meanwhile, involves harnessing new technology “to support the public good, especially by addressing health and social challenges.” On this front, we’ve seen dramatic developments over the last twelve months — not only the mass roll-out of new vaccines, but also the use of technology to control the spread of the virus by controlling the movement of people.

Suggested reading

Could you spot a conspiracy theorist?

By Matthew Sweet

The notion, held by some extreme conspiracy theorists, that vaccines are being used to inject tracking technology directly into our veins is, of course, nonsense. As per usual, the conspiracists have put two and two together to make five. Nevertheless, the two and two do exist. Indeed, we already use sub-cutaneously injected microchips on our pets.

Even the most nightmarish conspiracy theories contain a grain of truth. For instance, I feel confident in stating that vaccines are not being used to sterilise the population; however, lockdown has accelerated an already worrying decline in birthrates.

A collectively experienced nightmare is pretty much what a conspiracy theory is. The dream itself might not make any sense, but the anxieties and insecurities that cause it are often very real. In other words, you don’t have to believe a conspiracy theory to take it seriously.

Consider the news that investment companies are now piling into the property market, buying up housing en masse in order to rent it out. What is the ordinary aspiring homeowner to make of that? What chance do they have against corporations that have billions of dollars at their disposal — not to mention privileged access to market information and tons of political influence?

In that position, how would you feel about the World Economic Forum video that starts with the statement that, by 2030, “You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy.” To be clear, this was presented as a possible scenario, not a stated goal on the part of the WEF, but the optics are horrible. It doesn’t help that one of the institutional investors active in the housing market is BlackRock — whose CEO, Larry Fink, is a prominent WEF participant.

For someone facing the prospect of renting a pokey flat into middle age and beyond, this is what the Great Reset looks like.

Suggested reading

Are the conspiracy cranks a little bit right?

By Gavin Haynes

The irony is that when Klaus Schwab says that “we need a ‘Great Reset’ of capitalism”, he’s absolutely right. But that’s not primarily because of the pandemic, but because the system was already in a state of decay. Over the 21st century, we’ve seen capitalism lurch from one crisis to another and we need to remember who’s been in charge during that time — not Herr Schwab, but the political and business leaders who attend his annual jamboree.

If we do need a new capitalism, the last people we should ask to reset it are the architects of the present-day variety. Why on Earth would we entrust those who have grown so rich and powerful from the status quo with the task of reform?

The Great Reset might sound like a new commitment to real change, but at Davos the only thing that gets reordered are the ingredients of that year’s word salad. Just look at a list of themes for all the annual conferences since 1988: In 1991, the theme was a “new direction for global leadership”, in 1994 “redefining the basic assumptions of the world economy” and in 1997 “building the network society”. 2007 was about “shaping the global agenda” and “shifting the power equation”. In 2009 it was “shaping the post-crisis world”. In 2012, Davos was still “shaping” things, in this case “new models” for something called “the great transformation”. In 2014, it was “reshaping the world” and in 2019 “shaping a global architecture” (whatever that is).

When not shaping and reshaping, Davos is about “rallying”, “redefining”, “creating”, “sustaining” and “mastering”. Furthermore, they’re always doing it on some inconceivably vast scale: “the world economy”, “our global future”, the “post-crisis world”, the “new reality” and, my personal favourite, “responsible globality”.

Like the world’s dullest Bond villain, “Davos Man” is forever trying to remake the world in his image. But, of course, this never amounts to a true “reset”. Rather, our stagnant version of capitalism goes on and on, making the minimum adjustment required after every crisis. And, despite the conspiracy theories, this time is no different.

The terrible truth about the Great Reset is that there is no Great Reset.

And the apparatus? Well, that’s the machinery that helps you to decide whether or not to take these words seriously. The masthead of UnHerd. The byline. My bona fides, that sketch what I do when I’m not here, brightening your day. And, most importantly, the little numbers that show I’ve attempted some homework and give you the means to mark it. The footnotes[1.  Thanks for looking. You’re my kind of person. And you may be already thinking: is this a true footnote, or is it an endnote? Digital texts blur this distinction.].

The footnote is a small thing, but so much depends on it. Good writers can use it to supply data that might otherwise disrupt the flow of their story. The single most pleasurable element of Matthew Sturgis’s excellent Aubrey Beardsley: A Life (1999), for instance, is the footnote revealing that Dame Edna’s creator Barry Humphries furnished the information that the subject’s name should be pronounced “Ah-brey” and not “Orbrey”[2. Matthew Sturgis, Aubrey Beardsley: A Life (1999), p. 30. Humphries heard it from Beardsley’s contemporary, the painter Charles Moresco Pearce]. In fiction, Susannah Clarke and Flann O’Brien have used footnotes to add depth and curiosity to their own strange invented worlds[3. Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004) cites a number of invented occult texts; Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman (1967) cites invented scholarly works on Professor de Selby, who believes that water can be diluted and that night is a product of “black air”]. In most non-fiction, the footnote (and its sister, the endnote) articulates a covenant of trust between reader and author: an assurance that sources are being used with honesty and integrity. It confirms good and scrupulous work; reveals error, bad faith and intellectual poverty. When it comes to distinguishing the bullshit from the good stuff, the footnote is your friend.

So let’s work through the two examples that made me want to write this piece. They emerged in the last few days from opposite ends of the political spectrum — if such a thing still exists. One went viral, the other failed to spread — though it did provide a glimpse into a deep reservoir of prejudice.

The first came in the form of a scientific paper claiming that face masks were not only useless against the spread of Covid-19, but might in themselves “cause health deterioration, developing and progression of chronic diseases and premature death” [sic]. The study had appeared in the journal Medical Hypotheses in November 2020, but attracted little attention until mask-averse commentators tried to share it on social media — and found that it was being blocked or red-flagged. At which point ‘Facemasks in the COVID-19 era: A health hypothesis’ became a cause célèbre.

The celebrants were a familiar cast of culture warriors and conspiracy theorists, among them Diamond and Silk, a pair of pro-Trump activists with 2.38 million Facebook followers, Raheem Kassam, co-host of Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast and author of Enoch Was Right (2018), and Naomi Wolf, whose current conspiracy theories about vaccines, time travel and Israel’s influence over Dr Anthony Fauci defy both decency and easy summary. As they posted and tweeted, news sites of the kind unlikely to win a Pulitzer lit up like Diwali, many following the line that “Big Tech tyrants” had suppressed a “peer-reviewed study done by Stanford University that demonstrates beyond a reasonable doubt that face masks have absolutely zero chance of preventing the spread of Covid-19”.

Trouble was, this study was neither peer-reviewed nor a product of Stanford University. Its author, Baruch Vainshelboim, is a clinical exercise physiologist with no institutional position at Stanford or apparently anywhere else[4. “The author’s affiliation is inaccurately attributed to Stanford, and we have requested a correction. Stanford University has never employed Baruch Vainshelboim. Several years ago (2015), he was a visiting scholar at Stanford for a year, on matters unrelated to this paper.” Email (21/04/21) from Julie Greicius, Senior Director, External Communications, Stanford Health Care, School of Medicine]. (He did not respond to requests to clarify his status.) His paper appeared in Medical Hypotheses, a peculiar anything-goes journal whose tolerance for fringe ideas has led it to accept papers proposing that that high-heeled shoes cause schizophrenia, masturbation alleviates nasal congestion and Gulf War Syndrome is a form of beef allergy.

Did this discredit him? Not much, according to the American Institute for Economic Research, which praised the editorial ethos of Medical Hypotheses and the “well-published and well-cited” Dr Vainshelboim for “a devastating analysis of the harms caused by widespread, universal masking”. Dr Vainshelboim is certainly prolific. According to Google Scholar he has published six papers in the last 300 days, on subjects a various as lung transplants, cardiorespiratory fitness and handgrip strength in the elderly. And his analysis is devastating, if you care about proofreading or believe that a citation should accurately reflect the source to which it leads.

Vainshelboim’s paper has 67 references. If you go to the trouble of following them, you get the measure of his work. His claim, for instance, that masks cause a build-up of C02 in the lungs – now thoroughly debunked – is supported by an article in Medical Hypotheses that seems as flaky as his own. His assertion that the case fatality rate of COVID-19 is considerably less than 1% is backed up with a paper from March 2020, the earliest days of the pandemic. A study with which he argues the uselessness of masks actually draws the opposite conclusion: “Surgical face masks,” it reports, “significantly reduced detection of influenza virus RNA in respiratory droplets and coronavirus RNA in aerosols.” When the thread of each note is pulled, all that really remains of Dr Vainshelboim’s thesis is his mangled assertion that he is “providing prosper information for public health and decisions making.”[sic]

Bad work like this circulates because it appears to be academic research in the same way that Mickey Mouse appears to be a mouse. Its apparatus — abstract, footnotes, references, tables — beguiles the eye, particularly one already convinced it can discern the shape of an authoritarian New World Order. When challenged, conspiracy theorists often tell their detractors to do their research — by which they usually mean sharing online articles they haven’t quite finished. Dr Vainshelboim’s paper is a perfect addition to the reading list, and can now take its place in a pseudo-scholarly system where rotten sources move endlessly along lines that were established long before Alex Jones or David Icke were born.

Which brings me to my second example. A deep historical one from the fascinating space of the Twitter feed of the former Labour MP Chris Williamson. “This thread,” he declared last week, “is essential reading for anyone interested in creating a better society that isn’t run in the interests of wealthy elites.” The wealthy elites, it turned out, were the Rothschilds, whose name, in this context, seemed not so much an anti-Semitic dog whistle as an anti-Semitic Spinal Tap guitar solo.

The hero of the thread shared by Williamson was Abraham Lincoln, who, it related, had rejected the offer of a 24% interest bank loan from the Rothschilds bank and instead opted to pay his Civil War troops by issuing the greenback dollar. “Democracy will rise superior to money power,” declared Lincoln, in a quote with a plausible citation —  “Senate document 23, p. 91, 1865” — which was then followed by a cry of Rothschild vengeance, attributed to the London Times of 1865. “That government must be destroyed, or it will destroy every monarchy on the globe.” One of Williamson’s followers suggested that this story should form part of the school curriculum.

So where did this come from? Perhaps Williamson wasn’t aware, but the original poster had found these details in an online article by one Justin Walker. It had also attracted the attention of the think tank Modern Money Scotland, and the tax campaigner Richard Murphy, Visiting Professor of Accounting at Sheffield University Management School, briefly an economic adviser to Jeremy Corbyn. Murphy hailed the piece as proof that the banking reforms he favours were “a battle tested (literally) alternative to debt and austerity based economies” — and posted it on his website. Which was unfortunate. Because all the key sources in this article are false — the invention of 19th-century conspiracy theorists.

The vengeful speech attributed to the Rothschilds never appeared in The Times. It is a fiction that has been circulating since the late 19th century, as evidence of English perfidy. (It had some strange fans, and in 1898 received a sustained disquisition in the house journal of the Koreshans, a Florida cult that believed the earth was hollow.) It is often attributed to The Hazzard Circular, but hereby hangs another strange tale: the Circular is an 1880s forgery that purports to reveal a plot against America by a cabal of English bankers — and may have no material existence beyond its excited quotation in the work of figures such as Sarah Emery, author of Seven Financial Conspiracies Which Have Enslaved the American People (1887)[5. The quote is read aloud from a copy of the Hazzard Circular in this Congressional hearing from 1935].

But what about the quotes from Abraham Lincoln? The footnote is our friend. There is no Senate document 23 from 1865. Flip the year to 1939, however, and we end up in a Congressional Committee with Senator Robert L Owen, who is sharing a long string of Lincoln quotes in which the President rails against “money power”. And here’s the really odd bit. Lincoln said none of these things. They are words imagined into his mouth by the Canadian money reformer G.G. McGeer in his book The Conquest of Poverty (1935)[6. Gerald Grattan McGeer, The Conquest of Poverty (1935), pp. 186-7]. McGeer was an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist as well as a ventriloquist. The Conquest of Poverty argues that Lincoln was murdered by “the ‘secret foes’ of the nation … the money dealers, the members of the age-old craft of usury, whose prototypes were responsible for the crucifixion of Christ.[7.  Ibid., p. 212]”

Richard Murphy quickly removed the Rothschild quote from his website, apologising for his unwitting circulation of something potentially anti-Semitic. But Abraham Lincoln represents a tougher problem. One of McGeer’s phoney quotes forms part of the argument of Murphy’s magnum opus, The Joy of Tax (2016)[8.  Richard Murphy, The Joy of Tax (2016), p. 60.]. It’s part of Murphy’s perfectly reasonable case for reducing the power of the markets over the economy. And no wonder it fits so well: it was written in the 1930s, not the 1860s.

The citation is “Library of Congress, No, 23 … p. 91.” And we know where that leads. Where all footnotes lead. To sources, fair and foul. To those little numbered elements, often ignored, that form the body of the text, and show us its substance, and how it was made, and how to judge it.

But we parted on good company and I withdrew, with suitable obsequiousness, through what I thought was the door. Straight into his walk-in closet. When I sheepishly emerged, he was asleep.

Back then there was certainly a somnolence about the mainstream US media, a resting-on-laurels patrician grandeur — walk-in closets for the anchors, self-regarding “journalism studies” courses for the youngsters. It all suggested that, in the internet age, they didn’t know what was about to hit them.

Well, it’s hit them now. Right between the eyes. Both the Fox and CNN news channels are about to be displaced by Newsmax (to the right) and MSNBC (to the left). Not that it matters too much. Today, the traditional networks are largely watched by people whose hands shake too much to change the channel when the adverts come on for Viagra or dentures.

More from this author

So what if Trump pardons himself?

By Justin Webb

In fact, according to Pew research, more than half of Americans get some or most of their news from social media, mainly Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. And as Pew points out, this new-age media isn’t particularly helpful: Americans who turn to social media for political news are not only “less aware and knowledgeable about a wide range of events and issues”, but they are also “more likely than other Americans to have heard about a number of false or unproven claims”.

Perhaps the biggest of those claims is that Donald Trump won the election. Certainly large numbers of Americans believe it: around 32% according to a recent CNN poll. Meanwhile, YouGov reports that one in five voters — and 45% of Republicans — supported the storming of the Capitol.

What are we supposed to do with them? In the new age of Biden, the call goes out, let the values of pluralism that he would have recognised as a young man — the values of Walter Cronkite in his pomp — be the lodestone for the healing nation.  Blitz the dotty folk with real news, regulate social media, tell the truth in White House press briefings and, most importantly, respect facts. Breathe in. Respect truth. Breathe out.

It’s a seductive suggestion. But the philosopher kings and queens are wary. They wonder if the answer to ignorance is something other than knowledge, something even more difficult to pin down. In a recent column for the Atlantic, Anne Applebaum wondered what we should do with the “seditionists” who stormed the capital. Her conclusion: “Drop the argument and change the subject.”

Don’t bother with fact-checking. Don’t harangue people about Democracy and Freedom and the American Way. In fact, stay right off these subjects.

Suggested reading

America's struggle to end extremism

By Douglas Murray

There is a growing body of academic research that supports this view — a body added to recently by the Cambridge philosophy research fellow, Daniel Williams. In a blog published by the LSE, Williams introduces us to the idea of “rational motivated ignorance”.

“For a typical citizen,” Williams says, “political knowledge is just as often a liability as a source of power. Ignorance protects us from painful truths, insulates us from responsibility for our actions, and sustains the relationships that we depend upon for meaning and belonging. To understand and address societal ignorance, we must come to terms with such benefits.”

Here we return to Applebaum’s solution of simply changing the subject. As Williams puts it: “When societal ignorance is rational motivated ignorance, the solution cannot be ordinary forms of knowledge dissemination, persuasion, and fact checkers. Instead, our solutions must be much more targeted towards the interests and incentives that make knowledge costly for individuals.”

To which Joe Biden might reply: Huh? What does this actually mean? What should I do?

“Make the problem narrow, specific, even boring, not existential or exciting,” is Anne Applebaum’s suggestion. “’Who won the 2020 election?’ is, for these purposes, a bad topic. ‘How do we fix the potholes in our roads?’ is, in contrast, superb.” What this suggests — both for those who want to reclaim the Republican party and for those who want to press ahead with the Democratic agenda — is a move that is neither left nor right, but down.

It may not take the Democrats in the comfortable direction of the middle way. In fact, Biden’s unity agenda — some kind of bipartisan fudge that brings the nation together — might be a mirage best avoided. Instead, say a number of Democrats, what America needs is something far more radical.

Suggested reading

The War on Terror returns home

By Will Lloyd

They agree with Applebaum that the only way to forward is to simply get on and fix things. No doubt they’ll point to Obama’s first term, which was stuffed with serious misjudgements: they fruitlessly waited in vain for Republican support before spending money on infrastructure; they abandoned radical plans to create something like the NHS for all Americans, when in fact even the watered-down Obamacare was fought against tooth and nail by the Congressional GOP and still is.

David Sirota, an advisor to Bernie Sanders, wrote recently that the healthcare woes of the Obama administration “should be a harrowing cautionary tale for Biden on both the policy and the politics.” But Biden should know better: “He had a front-row seat in watching a bad-faith Republican opposition kill a much-needed initiative, and then use Democrats’ failure to deliver to win at the polls. He of all people should know that this story never ends well.”

And so America’s new President faces a paradox. In order to win back the middle ground, perhaps Biden needs to be radical. Certainly, he needs to reorder America — to actually provide solutions in a way that Donald Trump mainly failed to do.

As for where Biden should start, he could do worse than return to the musings of Donald Trump’s strategist Steve Bannon. Following the 2016 election, he called for a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill and tax increases on the rich, boasting that “if we deliver, we’ll get 60% of the white vote and 40% of the black and Hispanic vote and we’ll govern for 50 years”.

Well, that doesn’t sound too bad for the Biden team; the philosophers and the party radicals leading the way. Perhaps, as Walter Cronkite used to say, “that’s the way it is”.

For those who haven’t gone down the rabbit hole themselves, the broad QAnon narrative is a classic “new world order” conspiracy theory with an interactive and online twist. In QAnon world, the whole planet is controlled by a cabal of satan-worshipping pedophiles. Many QAnon adherents bizarrely believe that this cabal tortures children to extract a substance known as adrenochrome, which they purport (incorrectly) contains hallucinogenic and anti-aging properties. This cabal supposedly controls everything worth controlling, including politicians, the media, and entertainment.

In QAnon lore, these villains would have continued doing their evil indefinitely were it not for Trump’s 2016 triumph. Trump is believed to be battling this cabal with the help of a group of military intelligence officials known as “Q Team”. The QAnon faithful hold that these military intelligence officials are releasing coded messages about the operation to defeat the cabal on simple messageboards. The posts from the anonymous entity known as “Q” started on the infamous 4chan board, but now Q posts exclusively on 8kun. QAnon followers believe that by decoding these imageboard posts, they can learn the truth of this dramatic, secret war of good vs. evil.

Suggested reading

The myth of the anti-science Middle Ages

By Tom Chivers

The belief that Trump is cryptographically revealing his secret plan to cleanse the world of evil rapidly made inroads in mainstream American politics. Trump himself has used his Twitter account to boost QAnon, quote tweeting or retweeting QAnon accounts more than 185 times. QAnon followers have appeared at Trump rallies ever since July 2018. After Q told QAnon followers to take the “digital soldier oath”, thousands participated, including the embattled former National Security Advisor General Michael Flynn.

However, QAnon has also been connected to domestic extremism. In February 2019, the Phoenix Field Office of the FBI warned that QAnon, and other baseless conspiracy theories, pose an extremist threat. To cite a few examples of how this threat has manifested in the real world: a QAnon follower named Matthew Wright pleaded guilty to a terrorism charge for holding an armed standoff on the Hoover Dam Bridge. In New York, a QAnon follower with a history of attempting “citizen’s arrests” of politicans named Anthony Comello faces a second degree murder charge for the killing of a reputed mob boss.

A suspected QAnon follower named Ryan Jaselskis attempted to set fire to the Washington, D.C. pizzeria Comet Ping Pong, which is often baselessly accused of being a children sex trafficking hub by believers in the “pizzagate” conspiracy theory, the major predecessor of QAnon. Recently, in response to increased targeted harassment from QAnon followers, Twitter announced that it would no longer promote QAnon content in its recommendation algorithms or search results.

The insurgent QAnon movement is causing headaches for the Republican Party leadership, who appear to be unwilling to condemn the group for fear of losing much-needed votes, but are also unwilling to give direct credence to a conspiracy theory-driven movement that is loaded with political baggage.

The GOP congressional candidates have varying levels of enthusiasm for QAnon. On the extreme end, Oregon Senate Candidate Jo Rae Perkins gushes about QAnon at every opportunity, sometimes to the consternation of her own campaign staffers. “Where we go one, we go all,” Perkins said in one video, reciting the QAnon slogan. “I stand with President Trump. I stand with Q and the team. Thank you Anons, and thank you patriots. And together, we can save our republic.” In response to the nomination of Perkins, the Oregon Republican Party issued a statement that is devoid of any enthusiasm: “By virtue of being the GOP nominee, this is what we do — support them in winning the general election.”

Suggested reading

The myth of the anti-science Middle Ages

By Timandra Harkness

Other politicians have refused to acknowledge their QAnon-promoting past. For example, Marjorie Taylor Greene, candidate for Georgia’s 14th district, at one point was an active QAnon promoter. In one December 2017 video, she said that “many of the things that [Q] has given clues about and talks about have really proven to be true”. She has since not responded to inquiries about her QAnon beliefs.

Though Trump congratulated her victory, other Republican leaders threw their weight behind Greene’s opponent in the August 11 runoff election — but not because of QAnon. Rather, GOP leaders condemned Greene due to uncovered Facebook live videos comments in which she makes bigoted comments and promotes anti-Semitic tropes. A political action committee affiliated with conservative mega donor Charles Koch has also requested a refund of their donation to Greene’s campaign. Despite all that, Greene is currently the favored candidate to win both the runoff race and the general election.

At least one congressional candidate has distanced herself from QAnon since entering the general election. Lauren Boebert of  Colorado appeared on two QAnon livestream shows while campaigning. During a live streamed interview with QAnon promoter Ann Vandersteel, Boebert said “everything I’ve heard of Q — I hope this is real.” She has since said she doesn’t follow QAnon and called it “fake news”.

While QAnon followers aiming for national offices tend to draw the most attention, QAnon followers are also running for state offices. There are currently 12 known state-level candidates who have endorsed or given credence to the conspiracy theory or promoted QAnon content. One of these, Kevin Bushey, a Republican candidate running for District 151 of the Maine House of Representatives, is even a leader of a Zoom-based QAnon church that reads “Q Drops” — messages posted to image boards — alongside bible verses.

Even setting aside the absurdity of QAnon’s premise and the domestic extremism, the movement itself is nothing but a drain on society. Followers often get so obsessed with the practice of “decoding” Q posts that they alienate their own family and friends. QAnon followers clogged the National Human Trafficking Hotline with bogus tips, making it more difficult for real victims to seek help. They sometimes even take credit for the work of actual investigative journalists.

Suggested reading

The truth about 'Obamagate'

By Michael Tracey

But as a political movement, QAnon is a stunning success story. What other cause has adherents poised to be elected to Congress just three short years after inception?

It’s reasonable to ask how many of these candidates promote QAnon because they are true believers and how many think they may gain an electoral advantage by promoting QAnon. Candidate Jo Rae Perkins, in reference to her outspoken love of the movement, said in an interview: “It’s a very, highly calculated risk that I’m taking. Most people play it a lot safer than I do. It’s either pure genius or pure insanity. It’s one of the two. The voters are going to have to be the ones that make that decision.” As this is the first election year with a robust crop of QAnon candidates, it is also the first test of QAnon’s electoral viability. 

In November, in addition to learning whether or not President Trump will be elected to another four-year term, the vision of QAnon’s political future will be clearer. There is some historical precedent for a movement fixated on conspiracy theories gaining a significant share of power in American legislative bodies. The first third party in the United States, the Anti-Masonic Party, was dedicated to the proposition that freemasons were running a shadow government and were secretly plotting to control the world. Though the Anti-Masonic Party was short lived, at their peak in 1833 they controlled 10.5% of the House of Representatives. 

However, the QAnon community has an advantage that the Anti-Masonic Party didn’t: the ability to organise remotely online. Perhaps that won’t be enough to overcome the grudging support of Republican leadership and the stigma associated with a movement that has promoted absurd claims like that JFK Jr. is secretly alive or that there are “mole children” being rescued from Central Park in New York City.

But perhaps the advantage of social media organising will be crucial, allowing QAnon to achieve levels of political power that the Anti-Masons couldn’t. As always, it’s unwise to count out the carnival sideshow, no matter how wacky it appears.