Yet today, it’s clear that Idiocracy was, if anything, too optimistic. Twenty years hence, American public discourse is cruder and attention spans are shorter; mind-deadening drugs have become more pervasive, and politics is far more tribal and hateful than anything depicted by Judge. All this has taken place on a much faster time scale than Idiocracy predicted, moreover, and the changes are far more the result of ideologies spun up from resentment and hate than the biological degeneration featured in the film. 

Call it the Great Stupidization.

In Idiocracy, set in 2005, Joe Bauers (Luke Wilson), a low-ranking soldier in the US Army, and a prostitute named Rita (Maya Rudolph) are selected to be frozen for a year in a top-secret experiment. But with the general leading the initiative caught in a personal scandal — he gets a little too close to the pimp who procures the prostitute for him —  the program is shut down and forgotten by the feds. Joe and Rita wake up 500 years in the future. 

During those five centuries, the narrator informs us, dysgenic breeding has dramatically dumbed down the American population, leaving Joe and Rita the two smartest people on the planet. In this brave new world, corporations dominate the globe, down to the hospitals and law courts. Massive piles of garbage are everywhere, and agriculture has failed because crops are watered with a branded sports drink (“Brawndo, it’s what plants crave”). Joe, with an IQ of 100 according to the scale of his era, scores off the charts on an intelligence test while in prison, and is then appointed secretary of the interior by President Camacho, a former professional wrestler who governs via spectacle. 

The parallels with our own world are easy enough to spot, from the reality-TV president to the short, declarative sentences that characterize both President Trump’s and Camacho’s manner of speech (“I know everyone’s shit is emotional right now,” Camacho declares amid a looming famine). We even have a form of scientific illiteracy similar to watering crops with sports drinks in the form of Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vaccine stance. He’s just using his position to promote Steak ’n Shake instead of Carl’s Jr., the real-life fast-food chain whose advertising motto in the film runs: “Carl’s Jr. — fuck you, I’m eating!” As for cinema, Americans in the film’s distant future relish watching human butts up-close, farting.

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Yet despite its obviously dystopian vision, the film reflects the optimism of the era from approximately the end of the Cold War to the Great Recession. Consider that its stupid people do not engage in racial or ethnic scapegoating. They’re not aggressively misogynistic, and the institutionalized homophobia is limited to a prosecutor telling the court that Joe “talks like a fag.” In Idiocracy, the president is black, and no one comments on it; compare this to either the woke left denigrating speakers for their whiteness, or those on the right who now believe that the value of an individual’s opinions depends on whether he is a “Heritage American.”

In the film’s future America, moreover, conspiracy theories do not seem to play any role, despite the fact that they dominate our own timeline, such as the QAnon theory that liberal elites like Hillary Clinton and Tom Hanks kidnap and rape children, with it being Donald Trump’s mission to stop them.  Stupid people in Idiocracy repeat corporate slogans, but they don’t believe that they have discovered secrets about the way society works that have been hidden from them by shadowy elites. Judge couldn’t imagine the toxic spew of hate and paranoia, fueled by fantasies of persecution and revenge, that we generate today.  

We laugh at QAnon, but we don’t fully consider the bloodlust generated in the theory’s adherents, who believe in a horrifying universe of elite Satanic pedophiles and dream of mass executions when the child rapists finally face justice. And the Epstein saga drags on, without proper moral weighing of its consequences for truth and probity. The reality is that not a shred of evidence has emerged for elite pedophile or sex-trafficking rings surrounding Epstein, and the woman who was most responsible for spreading these claims was a confirmed fabulist, with deep mental-health issues. Yet high-school-dropout-turned-congresswoman Lauren Boebert drags the Clintons before Congress in order to ask Hillary about the connection between the Epstein story and Pizzagate. Such accusations are nearly always combined with at least an undertone of violent threat. 

Our era, fueled by this venom, is much darker than that of the film. President Camacho compares favorably with Trump in terms of decency and interest in the common good. He at least wants to address his nation’s crises in a serious way. The fictional president even admits fault, unlike Trump, who blatantly lies about economic and crime data and has an uncanny ability to convince his supporters that up is down. 

As Camacho tells the House of Representatives, “I know shit’s bad right now. With all that starvin’ bullshit. And the dust storms. And we runnin’ out of French fries and burrito coverings. But I got a solution.” Camacho informs the audience that Joe has the highest IQ of any man alive, and the crowd is impressed. After the speech, Camacho promises Joe a full pardon for a crime he is facing if he fixes the crop situation. That implies public-spiritedness and can be contrasted to Trump’s use of the pardon power for the benefit of those who can help him politically or who contribute to his family’s various crypto scams. 

Dumb people in Idiocracy are relatively harmless: they just want to be entertained. They don’t harbor deep, irrational social grievances, or construct false oppression narratives for themselves. Yes, they will laugh when a guy gets hit in the crotch — the 26th century has an entire TV show dedicated to the concept, Ow My Balls — and they enjoy criminals being eliminated in a spectacle that is a combination of a monster-truck rally and the Roman Colosseum. But there’s none of the ideology-driven moral righteousness that has motivated many of history’s greatest atrocities and now fuels contemporary haters. They’re also much humbler. When told that the smartest man in the world is going to fix their problems, they’re inclined to give him a chance, rather than think that they know better because they “did their own research” on vaccines. 

In Idiocracy, humanity’s IQ drops, but the impact on our moral culture is relatively limited. We still maintain capitalism and democracy, albeit in degraded forms. The achievements of the civil-rights revolution are apparently locked in for good. The morons seem generally happy, comfortable with their place in the universe.

In the real world, we know that intelligence has a strong association with practically every positive trait we might measure. Smart people are more tolerant of others, have more liberal social views, and are less authoritarian. They commit fewer crimes and are more pro-social, which is the main reason why richer communities, where the people are more intelligent, are nicer places to live. Intellectual elites not only have nicer houses, but are also better friends, neighbors, and citizens.

Perhaps the fact that the movie’s stupid people are so much more decent than our own explains why the America of Idiocracy maintains a GDP per capita that is higher than one would expect based on the national IQ. Their society still has advanced technology, such as a machine at the hospital that correctly diagnoses one’s condition by putting tubes into various orifices (the dull health-care workers, of course, manage to screw it up, putting the wrong tubes into the wrong orifices before correcting their errors, to hilarious effect). Rita finds it easier than ever to work as a prostitute: she doesn’t need the protection of a pimp, and the johns are stupid enough to pay without her having to service them. 

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The relative success of Idiocracy’s America — a country where everyone is borderline or fully retarded, yet the streets are safer than modern Honduras or Brazil — is never satisfactorily explained, though the public does appear to be dulled into a much less agentic state. We are told that the English language has deteriorated into a combination of “hillbilly, valley girl, inner-city slang, and various grunts,” reflecting popular subcultures that exist in modern America, and giving the speech of the masses a comfortable familiarity. But conspiracy theorists were too far below the radar in the mid-aughts to get representation; if Judge made the same film today, he would fail the test of verisimilitude. 

The benevolence of the universe of Idiocracy — and of our former world, or at least the way we perceived it — is also reflected in its omission of international relations. You would think that maybe countries would genetically decline at different rates, allowing one state or a small group of them to establish hegemony over the rest. But 1990s and early-aughts optimism saw the world as such a safe, predictable place, the film fails to even gesture at such possibilities.

The mechanism through which humanity gets stupider in Idiocracy is genetic, while what’s happened to us has been the result of screens melting our brains, demagogic politicians exploiting preexisting ignorance, and the internet and social media removing gatekeepers and democratizing the discourse (yes, healthy public discourse needs intelligent gatekeepers, a fact that was obvious to Western civilization going back to Plato). Moreover, it is at this point difficult to see many scenarios where we get to 2505 without humanity being either destroyed by artificial intelligence, or so transformed by it as to be unrecognizable.

Insofar as this fate is the result of advanced technology, we might say that the real problem has been not too little intelligence, but too much of it, carelessly applied. The confidence of the Idiocracy era contained the seeds of our downfall. We once believed that you can get as dumb as you want and the world would still remain relatively safe; no one would look for reasons to hate; and other human beings, whether foreign adversaries or local criminals, would be unlikely to try to purposely hurt you. The crude genetic determinism of the film likewise obscured the more immediate threats to human cognition; the iPhone was officially announced a mere four months after Idiocracy’s release.  

Luckily, we still have the biological potential to change course. But doing so must begin with a recognition of how bad things have gotten, and a realization that a stupider world is also a much darker and more unsettling one. The political discourse is not simply insignificant chatter providing various forms of entertainment and anxiety to tens of millions of Americans. It reflects the character with which we approach public life and the nature of our existence as political animals. From that perspective, we are in many ways in a more degraded state than the viewers of Ow, My Balls!. 

Dismissed for years as the “QAnon Congresswoman,” Greene leaves Washington a different woman. Drained of her bubbling “optimism,” as one source close to her put it, Greene is now divorced from her husband and divorced from her president — but faithfully married to the cause of America First.

It was, in Greene’s own telling, the algorithms that sent her spiraling into conspiracy theories in the 2010s. It was algorithms that rocketed her to prominence. It was algorithms that made her one of the GOP’s top fundraising assets. And it may have been algorithms that sent her packing, though they’ll almost certainly guide Greene to her next destination soon enough. 

This is a new form of populism, a strain that represents the online rage fueling an uneasy horseshoe alliance between the populist Left and Right. And it’s no longer confined to the internet. Greene’s arc is what happens when the everyman’s rage is stoked by social media — sometimes for the better and sometimes for worse — and then escapes the algorithm for Washington, DC. 

In her early days in DC, Greene was dogged by headlines like “Marjorie Taylor Greene indicated support for executing prominent Democrats in 2018 and 2019 before running for Congress” and “Video surfaces of Marjorie Taylor Greene confronting Parkland shooting survivor with baseless claim.” Sworn in about 24 hours before the Jan. 6 riot, Greene was elected amid pandemic fever, cruising to a comfortable victory, in which she won 75% of the vote. 

That put her about six points ahead of Donald Trump in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, situated in the state’s northwest corner between Tennessee and Alabama. Greene originally planned to run in her own, more affluent district that included some of Atlanta’s shifting  suburbs, but swapped her bid to the much less competitive 14th District, after the incumbent representative announced his retirement in 2019. 

Georgia 14, long home to the state’s carpet industry, is heavily rural and populated by voters who blame NAFTA and immigration for their economic struggles. Trump was impressed, calling her a “future Republican star” and sending the media — along with the GOP establishment — into a tizzy.  

Born in Milledgeville, a small city of 17,000 in central Georgia, Greene proudly remembers growing up around her family’s construction company. She graduated from South Forsyth High School in 1992, then the University of Georgia in 1996. Six years later, she purchased Taylor Commercial from her father.

In 2022, after 29 years together and 27 years of marriage, Greene’s husband Perry filed for divorce. Greene herself had filed 10 years earlier amid allegations of cheating, though the pair reconciled before calling it quits after she entered Congress. Several months later, Greene and newly divorced conservative media figure Brian Glenn — best known for questioning Volodymyr Zelensky’s wardrobe in the Oval Office — confirmed they were dating. They became engaged on Monday.

Like many Gen-X moms, Greene racked up an extensive Facebook history during the 2010s. Animated by the strains ObamaCare had put on her family’s successful business, the future congresswoman got hooked on Trump early. 

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But her sense of injustice and distrust also sent her in bizarre directions. She questioned whether school shootings were false flags, whether a plane really hit the Pentagon, and what was going on with the internet poster named “QAnon.” Her Wikipedia page is full of reminders of a febrile recent past, including forays into #Pizzagate and Seth Rich, among other conspiracy theories, as Greene used Facebook as a form of activism and started blogging for a website called American Truth Seekers sometime around 2017. 

In the spring of 2019, Greene shouted at Parkland survivor David Hogg in Washington, and filmed a Facebook Live video outside Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s office telling the lawmaker to “get rid of your diaper.” 

A little more than a year later, the mother of three, Crossfit enthusiast, and small-business owner earned her own office on Capitol Hill, not unlike AOC, the bartender-turned-congresswoman she’d been yelling at months earlier.  

Her pandemic-era campaign made good use of the backlash. “I’ve made all the right enemies,” Greene tweeted during her run. “The Fake News Media hates me. Big Tech censors me. The DC Swamp fears me. Now Soros and the Dems are trying to take me down. I’m running to Save America and Stop Socialism.”

But it was in the new year, after Jan. 6, that a newly elected Greene delivered one of the most significant speeches on the House floor in modern history. Her remarks barely budged the perception of Greene in Washington, and were quickly forgotten. But they shouldn’t have been.

As a vote loomed to strip Greene of her committee assignments, she calmly took to the floor to explain herself. “What you need to know about me is I’m a very regular American, just like the people I represent in my district,” Greene said, mouth hidden behind a face mask emblazoned with the slogan FREE SPEECH. “And like most people across the country, I never, ever considered a run for Congress or even to get involved in politics. As a matter of fact, I wasn’t a political person until I found a candidate that I really liked, and his name is Donald J. Trump.”

But, Greene continued, “when we elected President Trump, and then I started seeing things in the news that didn’t make sense to me like Russian collusion, which are conspiracy theories also, and have been proven so, these things bothered me deeply, and I realized just watching CNN or Fox News, I may not find the truth.” 

“And so,” Greene remembered, it spiraled from there, “What I did is I started looking up things on the internet, asking questions, like most people do every day, using Google. And I stumbled across something and this was at the end of 2017 called QAnon.” 

Greene said she walked away from QAnon and fringe conspiracy trends later in 2018, after discovering holes in the theory. She said her campaign never mentioned the word QAnon. She said she believed Parkland survivor David Hogg.

The speech was contrite and honest, a genuine explanation for how her rational distrust of institutions steered her, and many others, down unfortunate rabbit holes. That experience, if anything, is utterly representative. In her case, it represents both the good and bad: asking the questions, believing the lies, then abandoning them when the facts went in another direction. 

But Greene’s words landed like a lead balloon in DC, where there is scant tolerance for the experience of the ordinary American outside the halls of power. Greene, though, managed to lose only 11 GOP votes when Democrats orchestrated a push to take away her committee assignments amid a full court press from media and the Beltway establishment. 

One congressional insider remembers a tense private meeting ahead of the vote. “She came in and it was during this bruising time of all of her Facebook posts and previous statements being unearthed. This was space laser time,” the insider said. But while Greene was “defiant at first,” she apologized. She stood up and said she was sorry to her fellow members for having to answer for her. “Anytime you get a reporter with concerns about me, you don’t have to answer, just tell them to talk to me,” she told the meeting, striking a “super conciliatory” tone, the insider says.

This “changed the whole mood of the room.” Republicans came up to the microphone and announced they’d vote in her favor. Greene had successfully “lowered the temperature.” 

The mild air, of course, did not last long. Outside the GOP conference, Greene shouted at AOC, repeatedly sought Joe Biden’s impeachment, shouldered heavy fines for refusing to wear a mask, and spoke at — then distanced herself from — a conference held by Nick Fuentes. 

Republicans took back the House majority in 2022, restoring Greene to committee assignments. Greene supported Kevin McCarthy for speaker, and the two remained on good terms even while the Florida populist firebrand Matt Gaetz, with whom Greene once embarked on an “America First” speaking tour, engineered McCarthy’s ouster. Ironically, it was Greene’s sparring with other MAGA populists that ended her time with the hard-Right House Freedom Caucus in 2023.

Nevertheless, “she was in a good spot, she was a productive member of Congress,” the congressional insider recalls of Greene’s tenure before this fall. That same source referred to Greene as Trump’s top “guard dog” in Congress for years. She defended Trump against virtually every charge for half a decade, before and after coming to DC. Just last year, Greene called the president “sweet” and said she was “loyal and unapologetically supported him everywhere and all the time.” 

It was the second Trump administration’s handling of Jeffrey Epstein documents that first drove a wedge between Greene and the president. Then Trump struck Iran, further alienating Greene, whose views on foreign policy lean toward an anti-interventionist flavor of “America First.” Finally, during the government shutdown, Greene started criticizing Republicans sharply for ignoring an imminent health-care crisis: the lapsing of subsidies that would send premiums skyrocketing for low-income people. This brought with it opportunities for the congresswoman, long Trump’s staunchest defender in the House, to join CNN and The View and 60 Minutes. 

By mid-November, Trump had enough. Deeming Greene “Wacky Marjorie,” he posted on Truth Social to say he’d endorse a primary challenge in Georgia 14. Just a few days later, Greene announced her retirement from Congress. 

Two sources separately pinned the blame for Greene’s turn on House Speaker Mike Johnson. As the government shutdown lingered for weeks and weeks, becoming the longest in history, Johnson didn’t take seriously the problem of members leaving DC with heaps of time on their hands. They were idle, looking for fights and itching for media hits. And it’s certainly true that Greene’s differences with Trump escalated during this time.

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Greene could be the tip of the iceberg for Johnson, who now faces a rumored wave of retirements from a deeply frustrated and demoralized conference. What should really keep Republicans up at night is whether Greene’s darkened sentiment is representative of voters, in the same way her experience on Facebook in the first Trump term represented a real growth in conspiracism fueled by institutional failure leading up to the pandemic.

Tempting as it may be to chalk Greene’s turn up to personal eccentricities, and that’s hardly out of the question, Republicans aren’t just losing a pain in leadership’s behind — they’re losing the member with the single highest share of small-dollar donors in all of Congress. 

And that’s not just about money. It means Greene resonates with her party’s base better than almost any lawmaker. (AOC is in a distant second place on that list.)

Yet her departure seems to have prompted a sigh of relief in the House. “I doubt there was a single member sad to see her leave,” one senior House Freedom Caucus source in the lower chamber told me, describing her behavior as “super unprofessional.” Other sources remembered her early days in Congress warmly, but acknowledged she came with a flip side. “She’s genuinely a nice person, but she can lose her shit and be a mean person too,” said one.

In Greene’s case, her policy populism came in temperamental populist packaging. That is to say, she opposed the substance of her party’s policy agenda during Trump II, from the economy to foreign policy, but stylistically she also opposed the longstanding norms of politeness and collegiality with the other side. As Democrats like Jasmine Crockett are starting to flirt with this personality populism, Washington should wonder whether it’s possible to keep a lid on both flavors — the substance and the style. 

Asked about Greene’s retirement, one insider pointed out the news didn’t leak strategically to Beltway rags or break in a juicy sitdown interview before the congresswoman made her announcement. She simply posted it to social media. Ostensibly unscripted and shot on a cellphone, the video featured Greene saying, “Loyalty should be a two-way street and we should be able to vote our conscience and represent our district’s interest, because our job title is literally ‘representative.’”

“She gets the value of wearing your heart on your sleeve,” the source noted. “That’s something Trump taught the Republican Party…. When she talks, a lot of conservative women across the country say, ‘You know what? I’m a pissed-off mom who’s getting crushed by all these stupid things in Washington.’ She’s been able to speak for a lot of people.” 

This is the Epistemology of the Algorithm, a double-edged sword. It exploits our reasonable distrust of institutions, pulling us into irrational conspiracies for rational reasons, stitching together paranoia and anger, driving highs and lows. Consider the Greene who “lowered the temperature” in the private GOP conference meeting ahead of Democrats’ effort to oust her from committees. Then consider the Greene who got booted from the Freedom Caucus. 

The insider described her jokingly as “bipolar,” but in a broader sense, that description makes sense. We’re in the liminal space between life before algorithmic social media and life after it. Gen X and Millennials aren’t quite one or the other. But we can see what’s coming, and Washington is not prepared. Greene wasn’t either.

A not insignificant part of Trump’s support came from algorithmic populists like Greene, people whose political awakening began with Trump and the reaction to him. They got online. They dug deep. They saw Trump as a disruptor. This is a populism built on social media, where the incentive system rewards strong emotion. It’s black and white: trust and distrust, love and hate, in or out. 

Trump’s second-term flirtation with elite interests, from Epstein to foreign policy to Big Tech, puts him on the wrong side of that equation for algorithmic populists like Greene. She’s only a representative for a few more weeks, but she will represent a virtual district of likeminded people for years to come. 

At around the same time, shit-posting Disney action hero and mixed martial artist Gina Carano spotted a grand historical pattern: “Mao attacked farmers. Stalin attacked farmers. Now, world governments are attacking farmers. Same group throughout history. It’s a playbook, it’s not a chance happening. Wake up.” Then Wide Awake Media posted an image of thousands of acres of “prime agricultural land” squandered by solar panels, captioned with a rhetorical question: “is this one of the reasons for the globalist war on agriculture?”

The global famine conspiracists lurk on X and Facebook and YouTube. They are the ones who repeatedly remind us that Henry Kissinger said “control foods and you control the people”, despite the fact he never said such a thing. They will try to convince you that lab-grown meat and red dye 3 and bird flu are all part of the same plan, and that the best defense against a cosmopolitan elite intent on confiscating your farm and foisting crushed beetles down your throat is a gun.

The conspiracy theorist is generally dismissed as an irrational animal, yet the preachers of global famine are obsessed with logic and reason. Their dystopian vision emerges from a complex yet idiosyncratic understanding of history that ranges from Joseph in Egypt to the German multi-national Bayer, engineers of genetically modified Roundup Ready wheat that can only be grown with the aid of their own patented Roundup Ready insecticides — thereby guaranteeing corporate control of the world’s bagels and buns.

Lately, their cup of evidence has runneth over: spiking commodity prices of coffee and cocoa, the mass death of bees, and the fact that a dozen companies own more than 500 consumer brands. Why else would the World Economic Forum force us to consume insects if they were not plotting to make farmers obsolete? Then there’s Tucker Carlson, who registered his famine fears during the Netherlands farmer protests in 2022: “Messing with the food supply tends to cause food crises, and then famine,” he surmised. “We should be worried with the big things. And the food supply is the biggest thing.”

One might be tempted to dismiss all this as the latest chapter of a longstanding story that historian Richard Hofstadter dubbed the “The Paranoid Style in American History”, a narrative that lays all our woes at the feet of covert operations. Yet when it comes to global famine, the theorists and their longstanding nemesis — the CIA — are on the same page, along with another unlikely ally, the United States Department of Defense. They all agree on one thing: how fast civil society can crumble when starvation knocks.

The espionage professional knows two truths about hunger: the first is that people do not starve because there is not enough food, but — as Nobel Prize laureate Amartya Sen has proven over and over again, from the Bengal famine of 1943 to Bangladesh in 1974 to Somalia and Sudan several times over — they starve because they cannot afford the price of food. In his groundbreaking work, Poverty and Famines, Sen showed that during the worst period of the Irish famine of the 1840s, ships packed with wheat, oats, cattle, hogs, eggs, and butter sailed south from the hardest hit areas to the markets of London. Similarly, during the worst of the Ethiopian famine of 1973, the country’s food production did not decline. The problem was that the food that could have saved famine-struck regions like the Wollo province and Tigray went to more affluent purchasers in Addis Ababa instead. Such food “counter-movements” led Sen to conclude that famines had as much to do with money and politics as with agricultural output,  which in turn indicated that direct cash supplements, for instance, could help solve the problem. No matter how many poor people starved, the rich never lost their most basic entitlement: a full stomach.

The second truth is that one of the quickest paths to massive popular demonstrations — and even regime change — is food inflation, hashtag the 2011 uprisings and conflicts throughout Syria, Iraq, Libya, Tunisia, and Yemen, collectively known as the “Arab Spring”.

These ideas have defined American government policy. After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the newly formed United States Department of Homeland Security defined the food sector as one of 17 federally recognized “critical infrastructures”. War games ensued, such as the “Silent Farmland” exercise in North Carolina, the “Silent Prairie” exercise in Washington, and “Exercise High Stakes” in Kansas. “Food defense” became a term of art, closely followed by a stream of white papers that introduced the idea of “agroterrorism” — that is, chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear threats to the food supply chain. Such concerns gained credence in 2018 when swine flu swept China, the home of around 400 million pigs — half the world’s supply.

That same year, an eclectic group of academics from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (in other words, the CIA), the United States War College, the Department of Defense, Los Alamos, and NASA’s Earth Observation for Security and Agriculture Consortium published an in-depth study on the risks of catastrophic failure. “Consolidation has become a defining characteristic of the evolution of the global food system,” noted the report. “Capturing any individual concentrated node within the global food system can have widespread and lasting ramifications.”

The way to strengthen the system was clear: build a more complex and resilient web of supply chains, originating from a widespread network of farms. Buying produce from your local green market had become as valuable an asset as signal intelligence from the Mossad. No one noticed the irony that the DOD had come around to the same set of social imperatives as the radical Left La Via Campesina, aka, the Global Peasant Movement: support local farmers.

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All of a sudden, everyone agreed — from the tinfoil-hat basement dwellers to cloak-and-dagger spooks to the overalls and pick-up crowd. And today, as American food prices ratchet up hand in hand with Trump tariffs levied against Canada, Europe, Mexico, and just about any food importer anywhere, food security has become an even bigger unifier.

For the person who benefits the most from unaffordable guacamole on Super Bowl Sunday is Vladimir Putin, a man who has made it his life’s work to study the dynamics of regime change — and has now put it in action. As a recent white paper from the Center for Strategic & International Studies noted: “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has caused the greatest military-related increase in global food insecurity in at least a century.” The Russian president has repeatedly targeted Ukraine’s agricultural infrastructure — its farms, fields, food processing facilities, and agricultural labor force — causing more than $40 billion in losses. The CSIS report concluded that the ensuing trade tensions “undermine European support for Ukraine.”

All this means that food security has become a hot topic in the mainstream media. The faux populists at The New York Post have been all over the food inflation story, noting that since the first of this year, egg and poultry price gouging reports were up more than 840%. The New York Times delivered its inimitable bourgeois version of the crisis, mapping the rising price of beef bourguignon at Le Bouillon Chartier in Paris, thereby revealing the untold story of buttered carrots (the price of the root vegetable has skyrocketed 20% in the last five years, and butter 30%).

Trump isn’t helping the matter. Already, his USDA has canceled one-billion dollars’ worth of funding for local food purchasing for schools — that is, money to buy produce from nearby farms. Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s DOGE has attempted to defund the World Food Program. And Trump’s new head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lee Zeldin, is doing his best to stop lawsuits against Bayer for their Roundup-induced cancers. If hunger spreads because people can’t afford the price of food, why is the Trump administration tinkering with social security benefits and the SNAP program for school breakfast and lunch, both of which are now in the sights of the DOGE minions?

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Yet, for once, the conspiracists don’t want to hear it. At a time when food security talk consumes the mainstream media — with The New York Times headlining famine in Sudan and Gaza, and even the staid Economist writing of “The coming food catastrophe” — the global famine conspiracy theorists have gone silent. Since Trump came to office, Ted Nugent has been content to hock 50th-anniversary autographed Stranglehold t-shirts. Wide Awake Media is back to analyzing the hidden truth bombs dropped by internet paint-by-numbers phenomenon, Bob Ross, RIP. Illuminatibot has reverted to publicizing the evils of Frazzledrip — the “elites drug of choice”.

Concerned that after 5,000 years the global hunger conspiracy might have gone silent, I dropped into the DMs of my old friend, Jacob Angeli-Chansley, aka the Q-Anon Shaman (the tattooed young man who wore horns to the January 6 insurrection, then went on hunger strike until he was provided with organic prison food), with whom I had spent some quality time in Phoenix last April. I was gratified to learn he had recently acquired his own cryptocurrency, $haman. Perhaps this was a hedge on food inflation?

I wanted to know how long the MAGA mafia could continue to harness the social media machine before the price of bacon and eggs took down the administration. After all — and just as the Department of Defense and Ted Nugent predicted — it was food inflation (plus a shot or two of senility) that took down Biden.

As usual, Jake was happy to provide the media with true facts: “Whether it’s to make people obese and die early or deathly thin and die early, hunger is the weapon used by tyrants and psychopaths to get their way, when all other means have exhausted themselves.”

Of course, after Trump pardoned him, the Shaman’s first move was to trade in his bullhorn and spear for something far more effective when it comes to protecting his daily bread. As is his wont, he posted it:

“NOW I AM GONNA BUY SOME MOTHA F— GUNS!!!”

It wasn’t long after that the disappearance of 25-year-old Alabaman Carlee Russell became an internet sensation. Russell had called 911 to report that she was helping a toddler she had found wandering along the side of a highway. But when officers arrived at the scene, Russell and the child were nowhere to be found. Instead, they found her wig, phone and car. Sparking a 49-hour police search, Russell then turned up at her parents’ home saying she had been blindfolded, kidnapped and forced into a vehicle, where she could hear a baby crying. She claimed she had been held in a home where a woman fed her cheese and crackers, but that she had managed to escape.

In a statement from her lawyer nine days later, Russell admitted that the entire story had been fabricated. Police reported that they had found some “very strange” searches on her phone, including “how to take money from a register without being caught” and “the movie Taken” — in which Liam Neeson tracks down a gang that has kidnapped his daughter in order to sell her into sexual servitude.

Days after Russell’s deceit was revealed, Californian “momfluencer” Katie Sorensen was sentenced to 90 days in jail. Her crime had been to falsely report, in social media videos that had gone viral two years earlier, that a Hispanic couple who “weren’t clean-cut individuals” had attempted to kidnap her two children in a suburban parking lot.

This collection of bizarre and sad stories point to a strange phenomenon. Awareness of human trafficking has curdled to such an extent that an increasing number of women think it feasible that they or their children could be snatched off the streets. Exacerbating their fears, Sound of Freedom was released in cinemas at around the same time Russell came clean. It tells the story of Tim Ballard and his foundation, Operation Underground Railroad, which purports to have rescued around 4,000 children from traffickers and has found a receptive audience.

Earlier this year, a Pew survey on American parenting found that 28% of parents of children under 18 — that figure rising to 35% of mothers — were extremely or very worried about their kids being kidnapped or abducted. The fear ranked third on the list of concerns, behind mental health issues and bullying, and above getting shot, pregnant or addicted to drugs. It appears that America’s long history of stranger danger has been supercharged by very modern forces.

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By Elle Hardy

The period between 1970 and 2000 is known as the “golden age of serial murder”, as the birth of the interstate highway system meant unprecedented numbers of people moved to urban and suburban centres. The resulting loss of community and greater anonymity is thought to be behind the dramatic increase in murders and abductions, with children and young women overwhelmingly the victims.

In the same era, a newly empowered generation of women entered the workforce en masse — which required them to outsource the care of their children to strangers. This contributed to the “daycare panic” of the Eighties — more commonly known as the “satanic panic” — in which thousands of unsubstantiated cases of “ritual satanic abuse” of children were reported around the country. Most of the alleged perpetrators were childcare workers, despite the fact that fewer than 1% of abuses have been found to take place in those settings. This anxiety suggests that America wasn’t ready to accept women leaving their children in the care of others.

While the number of serial killers in the US has decreased decade by decade, the fear remains stubborn. Urban legends about abductions have been around forever, but the internet has made them more widespread. Hoaxes about kidnappings are now clickbait staples on social media, and often find their way into local media. The online fact-checking website Snopes has a database of kidnapping hoaxes dating back to the Nineties, featuring reports of everything from a hook-handed psycho targeting teens making out in parked cars, to attempted abductions of kids from amusement parks being thwarted because the kidnappers forgot to change the child’s shoes.

This is not to say that horrific events don’t happen. When they do, they legitimise the fears behind some of the wilder notions. In 2002, for instance, 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart was kidnapped at knifepoint from her home by an itinerant preacher and held captive for nine months before being rescued. Smart has since become an activist who has testified in Congress, addressed conferences and become a film producer turning the stories of famous abductees into daytime television staples. In other words, tragic as it is, her story has had an outsize impact on America’s cultural consciousness.

And where there is fear, there are those waiting to exploit it. The anti-human trafficking cause, while virtuous on its surface, has become a lucrative business, both for groups who exist to raise awareness for it, and for influencer-entrepreneurs.”There is a willingness for a lot of nonprofits to say whatever they need to say to get donations,” says law professor Bridget Carr at the University of Michigan’s Human Trafficking Clinic. More often than not, these organisations are geared towards awareness and training, and not working in the actual field with genuine victims. As Carr notes, “many in the anti-trafficking movement are always willing to use sex trafficking as a synonym for human trafficking”.

Anti-trafficking organisations played a large part in promoting the myth that, each year, the Super Bowl is the largest human trafficking event in the world. As hundreds of thousands of people descend on the host city, the story goes, so too do pimps, prostitutes and unwitting victims. Researchers found that, between 2010 and 2016, 76% of US print media reported a link between the Super Bowl and trafficking for sexual exploitation; the story had also been picked up by outlets such as CNN and Reuters — even though there is no definitive data behind it, and it has been repeatedly debunked.

While media and societal shifts laid the foundations for the abduction panic, the advent of the pandemic brought such issues into the mainstream. Conspiracy was in the air, and lockdowns meant that many turned to online communities for company. In real life, people masking on the streets were suddenly viewed as unrecognisable, suspicious and potentially dangerous.

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By Jacob Furedi

It was in this atmosphere that a wannabe rapper, model and cryptocurrency enthusiast Scotty Rojas, aka Scotty the Kid, became radicalised by QAnon. On Instagram, Rojas developed the social media movement #SaveOurChildren, which promised to tackle “the real pandemic”, citing the false statistic that 800,000 children go missing in the United States each year — the equivalent of around 2,000 a day.

Taken up by a broad coalition of people — from wellness influencers to a former high-flying PR executive who went viral for destroying a display of face masks to raise the alarm about elite paedophile rings — the #SaveOurChildren movement began holding mass rallies around the nation. Though they existed in the name of child protection, they quickly became a way to protest against lockdowns and looming vaccine mandates, as well as progressive values in general, safetyism in particular and, on top of everything else, the validity of sex work. This “conspirituality” coalition had been building for some time. But as #SaveOurChildren grew in popularity, many who jumped on board were simply concerned parents who were absorbing disinformation via social media.

And yet, no matter how well-intentioned, online scare campaigns certainly weren’t addressing the real issues behind child sex trafficking, which ultimately require more robust welfare and state intervention. Overwhelmingly, trafficking victims, particularly children, are preyed upon by a close family member, or someone they know and trust. As Bridget Carr told me, during her many years working to advocate for children, she’s “represented hundreds and hundreds of victims and consulted on many more cases, and never, not one time in my case work has a child been snatched by a stranger. Not one time.”

Sensational tales do well on social media, with facts trailing far behind. Katie Sorensen was a failing influencer until her video went viral. As police investigated her claims, she appeared in news bulletins, repeating her story. On TikTok alone, videos tagged “abduction warnings signs” have 245.7 million views.

As with most social media ephemera, the energy behind the #SaveOurChildren movement has since shifted. Hoaxes about women being abducted outside Target stores are currently racking up tens of millions of TikTok views. In a climate where many have terrified themselves into believing that child abductions are happening all around them, it’s not much of a leap to believe women will be snatched too. The #MeToo movement, though it did an enormous amount of good, also led to a heightened sense of vulnerability among women, who were often already fixated on urban legends of abductions.

Behind the abduction panic is an even wider problem, then, than the legitimate crisis of global human trafficking. It is a product of the social isolation of modern America, which was accelerated by the pandemic. As we work from home, have our entertainment beamed to our couches and have food delivered to us, everyday interactions with strangers are becoming rarer and rarer. In turn, we’re becoming increasingly suspicious of everything and everyone. As with many of modern life’s ills, the way out of this new fear may just be spending more time in the real world and less time online.

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.

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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.

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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”.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Today, however, the British state’s inability to provide the most basic of functions — stopping crime; providing adequate healthcare, housing and functioning utilities like energy and water — are the central plank of political discussion. We have won the argument, yet there has been very little reflection on what this means, or how we have reached this dismal state of affairs. Worse, the people who brought us here are still in charge.

But what is the alternative? In their 2015 book Inventing the Future, the Left-wing writers Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams used the example of the Seventies crisis, which ushered in our current political and economic model, to examine the way in which one governing ideology can supersede its predecessor as the common-sense frame of political argument, and become hegemonic. The previous, dominant Keynesian framework had no immediate answer to the economic crisis of the time, and thus ceded ground to the free-market ideology of neoliberalism, which had created an ecosystem of think tanks and journalistic popularisers biding their time for a moment of crisis: “The neoliberals… had both a diagnosis of the problem and a solution.” As a result, they observe: “Government officials who were uncertain about what to do in the face of crisis found a plausible story in neoliberalism.”

The fundamental problem facing Britain today is the collapse of this chosen model, the fruit of a previous, lesser era of crisis. Instead of shoring up the state’s resilience to the pressures of an increasingly unstable world, the reliance on market forces has left the Government increasingly unable to impose order, provide functioning healthcare, keep the lights on or put roofs over people’s heads: a state that cannot provide these basic functions is really no state at all. We are witnessing the death spiral of the world created after the Seventies crisis; even conservatives now understand that things cannot continue as they are. To argue in favour of the current system is now the marginal and eccentric position: half the ideological battle has already been won.

And yet, no single viable alternative model is waiting in the wings; both parties are ideologically inflexible, far more so than voters. The most likely outcome is Westminster’s desperate political preservation of a rapidly collapsing system in which no one believes. The model has failed, but the people who imposed it, who genuinely believed in it and somehow still believe in it, remain in power. 

There have been no consequences for their decades of failure, and the detachment of voters from the people who represent them has never been greater. This is a deeply dangerous, unstable situation, which has already given birth to conspiratorial political religions, such as QAnon, Russiagate, and the Great Reset, which will doubtless multiply as living standards continue to plummet and politicians continue to fail. They seek to discern some underlying logic or rationale to events, when there is only incompetence and a dying political system bereft of ideas. At a moment of grave national crisis, we require a statesman of historic stature, with the vision and will to steer us out of disaster. Instead, we’re getting Liz Truss.

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But in reality, it no longer matters whether Truss or Sunak wins the battle to enter No 10. No one believes that either has any answers to the problems facing us, and the paper-thin dividing line between them is merely the narcissism of small differences. Similarly, the increasingly bitter battle over political control of the American state conceals the fact that whichever party wins will find themselves at the mercy of global forces they can no longer control. Across the Western world, the red lights are flashing in the cockpit, but no one knows how to fly the plane. 

Degrowth, the failed totalitarianism of the 20th century, political Islam; these aren’t useful alternatives, just fringe ideologies — more often used rhetorically by the current regime to justify its prolonged existence than sincerely adhered to. Fukuyama may have posited liberal capitalism’s victory because nothing had shown up to replace it; yet its failure looks more like the world we already inhabit, a world of niche micro-ideologies without any grand unifying project. 

To maintain the fiction of progress, we must believe that things are better now than they have ever been, even when they are demonstrably worse than any time in living memory. We are entering a post-progress era, where the achievements of the past decades, even centuries, will be reversed. We will, for the next decade at least, perhaps longer, be forced to live in a simpler, sparer way. The fat will be cut off, now we have entered the lean years. As Macron observed this week, “we are living through… what could seem like the end of abundance”. To describe the years since 2008 as an age of abundance seems absurd, but we may well soon be nostalgic for the stagnation of the 2010s.

It is as if we have entered a dark tunnel, and the political forms waiting at the end of it are too distant and obscure to make out. But there is no reason to believe things will get any better, and much reason to believe that there is much further for us to descend. We don’t know how the confrontation with Russia over Ukraine will end; there is the prospect of a grave escalation. We don’t know the consequences of a Chinese attack on Taiwan, now more likely than ever. But surely, given the West’s total dependence on China’s industrial base, it will dwarf the consequences of the Ukraine war. 

The term “crisis” implies an end state, like a fever breaking: but this is the new baseline normality. Next year will be worse than this year; the year after will be worse again. Previous attempts to stave off disaster, the mass demonstrations of the early 2010s and the populist wave that followed, were often inchoate attempts to correct our course: both failed. The ideological output of the 2010s, like fully automated luxury communism, posited a post-scarcity world of happy, abundant consumption derived through mining asteroids and other unlikely tech fixes. A decade later, we’re having to settle for energy rationing and trying to restore the very most basic competences of governance.

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By John Oxley

As the Marxist thinker Wolfgang Streeck warns: “We are facing a long period of systemic disintegration, in which social structures become unstable and unreliable, and therefore uninstructive for those living in them…” It is a time, perhaps lasting centuries, when “deep changes will occur, rapidly and continuously, but they will be unpredictable and in any case ungovernable”. Life in such a society “offers rich opportunities to oligarchs and warlords while imposing uncertainty and insecurity on all others, in some ways like the long interregnum that began in the fifth century CE and is now called the Dark Age”.

How are we to manage life in this hard new world, for ourselves and our children? The survival of the British state, our ark in the coming storm, is paramount. Yet whether the British state will even exist at the end of the decade is still a matter of helpless conjecture. We must demand a wartime level of mobilisation focused on state resilience: we are now far beyond nudges and quick fixes. This is a campaign for the basic functions of the state: streets that are safe to walk, homes to live in, healthcare for those in need, universal access to food, warmth and shelter. 

As Milton Friedman put it: “Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.” That time has now come. Of necessity, in a world without a convincing successor ideology, this new model of politics must be pragmatic and non-ideological. Centred on restoring the basic functions of statehood, it must unite Labour voters as well as Tories, socialists and conservatives. It is a call, I propose, for Anglofuturism.

“Anglo”, because Britain should survive as an entity focused on the health and prosperity of the people, and not merely as a theme park for international capital. Through shifting domestic industry abroad and encouraging mass immigration of low-wage labour at home, policymakers were able to create the illusion of prosperity, conjuring the outward form of a middle-class existence even as it demolished its foundations. But this world has now gone forever, leaving us poorer and less resilient. 

The “futurism” is for the understanding that unlike our current political class, this approach looks beyond the electoral cycle. It is the idea that the state, and the nation, have interests to be safeguarded over the course of generations, and that infrastructure should be built now to secure the lives and prosperity of our descendents. “Futurism” also because it harnesses the optimism and high modernism of the post-war era, a vanished world of frenetic housebuilding and technological innovation where British scientific research could lead the world, and produce higher living standards through its fusion with well-paid, high-skilled labour. 

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By Richard Vinen

The Anglofuturist vision of Britain is one where every county town has its own Small Modular Reactor providing clean, abundant nuclear energy. It is a country where cheap and reliable high-speed rail darts across the country, through the new towns where everyone who wants can have their own warm and spacious home, past the small family farms which provide the country’s food security. In the clean skies, electric airships move freight across the country; in our seas, teeming with fish, vast arrays of domestically-manufactured wind and wave power stations, the product of a revived industrial strategy, unite British ingenuity and manufacturing capacity in clean power generation that is the envy of the world. 

This is not a reactionary vision, for there is no going back: the Britain of the Fifties is gone forever, as is the Britain of the Nineties and the 2010s. Yet everything to come has been shaped by what has been before. Rooting our vision of the future in the best of our past, and Britain’s unique natural and cultural gifts, perhaps we can emerge from this crisis richer, happier and healthier than we have ever been. This requires a total, war-level shifting of the Westminster worldview, brought about by public pressure: after all, the political incentives currently in place are what brought us here. Like the austerity of the 2010s, which midwifed the weakened state of the 2020s, Truss’s desperate, cargo-cult Thatcherism promises only deeper, faster, harder collapse: it is the proposed cure that already ails us. We must look towards a pragmatic, emergency programme of rebuilding state capacity as a matter of national survival. Even as we enter a decades-long period of near-collapse, it is time to reject decline and embrace a better future: it’s time for Anglofuturism.

Yet McCarthy also appears to face a big problem. He already can’t control some of his wilder junior colleagues, including far-Right representatives like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar, who are a constant source of embarrassing headlines. Now, a new wave of MAGA mavericks — including Mayra Flores, a “far-Right Latina” known for sharing QAnon hashtags — are on their way to join them. 

There’s no doubt that these new Republican members will be controversial. But the question for followers of the American political scene is, how much will they really matter? A quick look at the recent history of the GOP suggests that the answer is: not much. Loose-cannon legislators are nothing new, and while they might cause headaches for party elders, they almost always vote with mainstream Republicans on the issues that really matter to the party. In other words, for all the sound and fury about an emerging QAnon caucus, don’t expect the Congressional Republican Party to change much any time soon. 

McCarthy’s trouble with his party’s Right began in earnest earlier this year, when an audio recording circulated in which he could be heard discussing the need for Donald Trump to resign after the January 6 riot. Whereas most in the press derided McCarthy for his cowardice in only criticising Trump behind closed doors, some of the Trumpiest members of the House saw the recording as evidence of McCarthy’s disloyalty. The minority leader drew harsh criticism from the far-Right Freedom Caucus, a group founded in 2015 to advocate for an “open, accountable, and limited government” that now serves as the home base for many of the party’s most truculent young members. 

The Freedom Caucus is certainly a colourful group. Take Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who chanted “build the wall” in unison at President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address in March. Later that month, the pair found themselves in a heated argument about Greene’s decision to attend the America First Political Action Conference in February alongside Iowa Congressman Steve King. King, of course, was taken off U.S. House committees by McCarthy and the GOP leadership after asking when the term “white supremacist” became offensive. 

King, however, is a moderate compared to the conference’s host, Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust denier and veteran of the 2017 Charlottesville riots who claims that “having sex with women is gay”. Breaking bread with Fuentes was apparently too much for Boebert. But Boebert is no stranger to controversy herself. In addition to voicing support for QAnon, the Colorado Republican has recently come under fire for abandoning her then-sister-in-law after a 2020 off-roading accident that occurred two months prior to her victory in a Republican congressional primary. She’s also been fending off salacious — and seemingly spurious — rumours that she used to work as a sugar-daddy call girl.

The Freedom Caucus was also home to Madison Cawthorn, the troubled MAGA stalwart who recently lost his primary after falling afoul of the DC Republican establishment, which he had accused of tolerating orgies and cocaine use among its members. The establishment fought back with a classic “dirty tricks” operation, digging up salacious rumours and passing them on to sympathetic journalists. The same American Muckrakers PAC that is now attempting to smear Boebert released documents and videos suggesting Cawthorn was sexually harassing his male second cousin, and someone leaked to The Daily Beast that Cawthorn’s chief of staff had received tens of thousands of dollars in outside money beyond what is permitted by House ethics rules. Cawthorn, having made himself into an annoyance, was unceremoniously shoved out of Congress. 

As strange as that saga was, Cawthorn’s brief tenure speaks to the fundamental strength of party politics in the American system. Crazies may get elected, but they live and die based on their ability to make themselves useful to the party. Rising MAGA candidates such as New York’s Carl Paladino, who called Adolf Hitler “the kind of leader we need”, and Washington’s Loren Culp, a former police chief who tweeted his support for hanging a black man who could be seen on video pushing a senior citizen down the stairs, may generate bad press, but they will vote with the party much of time — and if they make more trouble than they’re worth, they’ll be kicked to the curb. Trump himself was a shining example of this phenomenon: Although he exasperated Republican grandees, he was able to secure their support by pushing party priorities like tax cuts and conservative Supreme Court appointments.

This isn’t a new problem. Every few years, a new generation of GOP radicals emerges to shock liberal sensibilities, but the party’s priorities remain the same. The “Republican Revolution” of 1994, engineered by Georgia Congressman Newt Gingrich, broke the so-called “conservative coalition” of conservative Republicans and “boll weevil Democrats” that had worked together since the New Deal. But while Gingrich’s “Contract with America” contained novel proposals like term limits, these never came to fruition. Instead, the party hewed closely to its post-Barry Goldwater identity: Bill Clinton was forced to move to the right on issues such as crime and welfare, and his Republican successor, George W. Bush, worked with the GOP to pass sweeping individual tax cuts, expand the surveillance state, and conduct military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some legislators elected in 1994 evolved into establishment figures and major power brokers, while others were quickly defeated following gaffes and controversies.

The Tea Party movement, which coalesced in 2009 following CNBC reporter Rick Santelli’s call for a “Chicago Tea Party” to chasten big government, underwent a similar evolution. It failed miserably in its goal of shrinking the US federal government, but it succeeded in launching new Republican political careers, including those of pundit Glenn Beck, Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, and the aforementioned Iowa Congressman Steve King. At the time, some commentators saw the Tea Party as the voice of America’s forgotten heartland, but political scientist Robert Putnam was nearer to the mark when he observed that the Tea Party’s activists were simply Republican voters who wanted increased border security, restrictions on immigration, and a renewed infusion of some elements of traditional Christianity into public life. They were, in Putnam’s terms, “super-Republicans”, even if the rhetoric they used sounded alarmist, extremist, or unorthodox.

Even Trump himself — the seeming bête noire of Jeb Bush and all the other corporate Republicans he crushed in the 2016 primary — was another outgrowth of the Tea Party era. His rise to fame was built on the back of a quixotic campaign to determine the national origins of then-President Barack Obama coupled with clever tweets about things like Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank’s protruding nipples. Trump’s own reputation as a charismatic, unorthodox speaker with a socially libertine lifestyle led many to believe he could be all things to all MAGA hat wearers. But controversies and crises aside, this avowed fan of “Two Corinthians” came through on taxes and abortion, the core Republican political issues since Ronald Reagan assumed the presidency in 1980. Despite his rhetorical disdain for Mitt Romney and other old-guard leaders, Trump, once in office, delivered the goods that the party had long promised its base.

At the end of the day, then, Kevin McCarthy need not worry about what Carl Paladino and Loren Culp will do to the Republican Party. It will keep doing what it does best, asserting issues of public morality and low taxation that resonate with its long-term base, which is gradually assimilating more Latino voters. In doing so, it will be reasserting the power of historical continuity and frustrating the hopes for a more genuinely populist course espoused by “post-left dissidents” and members of the “New Right”. But McCarthy, who has served in Congress through the Speaker of the House tenures of John Boehner and Paul Ryan, surely knows that failing to find the right mix of velvet glove and iron fist could empower challengers and cost him his own position of authority. Political fortunes are always rising and falling in America, even if the partisan song remains the same. 

At the time a committed anti-capitalist, I experienced the ever more intrusive presence of advertising in the built environment as an unacceptable invasion. It felt like being tapped on the shoulder every three seconds by annoying canvassers while enjoying a quiet ciggie break.

So I set out to see if it was possible to ignore them. It was, it turned out, difficult: advertisers spend a great deal of money on being attention-grabbing, and it took a huge mental effort to tune out all that expensive effort to snag my awareness.

The “attention economy” was first theorised by the economist Herbert Simon in 1971: he called attention to the “bottleneck of human thought” and argued that in a world where this was a scarce resource, the smart money focused on grabbing a slice of it. After all, you can have the best product in the world but if no one has noticed you exist, you’ll still sink without trace. An immense amount of lucrative time and effort goes into the arms race for attention, and the results — not just on the Tube — are often eye-watering.

If it was difficult to swim against the commercial messaging tide two decades ago, it’s even harder now. When I did my Tube experiment, averting my eyes from the tsunami of paid-for messaging became exhausting after a few days. After a while, it was easier just to give in and swim on the tide of people trying to tell me what to buy. And today, the experiment would be harder still, with adverts covering every available surface and sometimes moving as well.

Over the same period, too, something equivalent has happened to the whole media universe. A vast commercial and political industry has developed with the aim of grabbing the punter’s attention and persuading us to buy, say or think something or other. The boundary between PR, journalism and propaganda is blurry to say the least, and flourishes atop an immense ecosystem of opinion-havers. And there’s no outside to it, short of moving to an uninhabited island with no internet access and never talking to anyone.

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As a result, we don’t just have an attention economy. We also have an attention politics: a byproduct of the explosion of content that came with the transition to digital culture. In that politics, what gets noticed isn’t just a bottleneck on the way to commercial success; it’s also the gateway to political power.

In the new attention politics, older information ideals curl up and die. For the liberal framework for thinking about communication dates back to a point before the internet, when information was relatively scarce, and could be suppressed. In that context, liberals wanted to resist such suppression, arguing that “free speech”, would enable a collective search for objective truth via a “marketplace of ideas”.

Along with this came the belief that free information and lively debate carries us all toward objectively agreed truths, while religious faith and moral principles should be as much as possible a private matter. Contemporary defenders of this gestalt gather at Quillette and other such “classical liberal” outlets, ever ready to mount a defence of free speech as a bulwark against bad ideas, or the importance of debate to the scientific method.

Now, though, we all have free speech. In a digital environment, you can’t really suppress it. Ban someone, and they’ll just pop up elsewhere (or in the case of Donald Trump, start their own social media platform). Not unrelatedly, what we have is no longer a scarcity of information but a superabundance.

The problem is, you can’t really have a functioning society where anyone can say anything — or at least it won’t function for long. So a great deal of soft social effort goes into constraining free speech, while still permitting speech to be (at least nominally) free. We can all say what we like; the battleground is now what gets noticed, and by whom.

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What does or doesn’t make the public eye is managed by a stifling social consensus that governs what gets liked, shared or referenced; what should be boosted by algorithms; and what should make it into the respectable press. Even the original Luke Skywalker, Mark Hamill, has fallen foul of this, after committing the dastardly crime of publicly noticing a Tweet by JK Rowling.

At the same time, too, “facts” have also become visibly unstable. In some cases, they vary dramatically according to local political conditions: for example, according to US officials, “gender affirmation” for children is officially “suicide-prevention care”. Meanwhile, officials in the UK and Sweden are rowing swiftly in the opposite direction.

And even where the facts themselves are not disputed, they aren’t really the main event any more. Instead, they’re data points for curated narratives. “NJ woman who forced daughter she fathered into child porn sentenced to 25 years in prison” is, on its own, just a story; but added to a curated list of related stories such as this one, it looks like a pattern of criminality worthy of notice — or of being deliberately ignored.

This sort of attention politics, the manipulation of narratives, sounds a death knell for the liberal ideal of politically neutral individuals or institutions. For confronted with an excess of competing and contradictory messaging, most sensible people don’t want to spend all their time working out what’s real. And when attention is scarce, political power accrues to those who are trusted to curate.

Most visibly, legacy media outlets now play this role: filtering the chaos of possible stories for a selection that fits (or at least doesn’t jar too sharply with) the readership’s worldview. But the facts, or stories, or data points we curate add up, cumulatively, to moral choices. If I notice the vulnerability of males who identify as women within all-male prisons, while (deliberately or not) ignoring stories that point to the vulnerability of women to males who claim to identify as women within all-female prisons, this adds up to a statement about what (or who) I think is important.

This variation in what’s emphasised (or mentioned at all) is easy to see across the national press: try toggling between New York Times universe and that of the New York Post, or between the Guardian and the Telegraph. You don’t need a media studies degree to infer the differences in moral framework that drive this differential noticing. And in any case, this isn’t an abstract game for media studies nerds. Our moral choices have real-world consequences.

Which set of “facts” is accepted by officials as true, about the right way to care for gender dysphoric children, will have significant medical consequences for youth in different jurisdictions. Or consider recent news that the state of New York is proposing to legislate for prisoners to be “presumptively placed” in accordance with their “self-attested gender identity unless the person opts out of such placement”. Set that against the list of crime reports above, and the decision to notice or not notice the link between the male sex and sex-offending adds up to a political choice that — as others have noticed — places real women at risk.

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And this is where the politics of noticing grows more contentious. For the general public aren’t mere passive bystanders. Noticing subcultures have swiftly emerged, sometimes sharply at odds with the official ones, and in which an effective curator can have real-world political impact. For example, the “Libs of TikTok” Twitter account is credited with having transformed US education debates — simply by collating video statements made by progressive teachers.

In turn, this has spawned a whole meta-industry of NGOs whose remit is to stop unofficial noticers getting out of hand. Recent years have seen a boom in “fact-checking” organisations, who aim to extend the governance of noticing out into the internet badlands, often funded by immensely wealthy philanthropists — many of whom have well-documented political agendas.

This looks variously like an attempt to defend truth from manipulation by bad actors, or else covert censorship riddled with obvious bias. But the internet abounds with people who have assembled truly outlandish narratives from their preferred data points, such as in the QAnon conspiracy. And “misinformation” isn’t just a self-serving elite story: bot farms are routinely used in information warfare, to give the appearance of mass support to overseas messaging operations.

It should come as no surprise, then, that even the US Government is now an overt player in the politics of noticing. Last week, Joe Biden launched a “Disinformation Governance Board” whose job it is to tell the rest of the English-speaking world what is or isn’t real on the internet. Predictably, though, the reaction to this body was cynical. And no wonder: for Biden’s intervention does no more to address the loss of facts, objectivity and truth-seeking driven by information superabundance, than obviously biased “fact-checking” bodies funded by progressive philanthropists.

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But no amount of such “governance” will stop people noticing when narratives are uplifted, deprecated, or transformed from “disinformation” to accepted fact — or prevent them wondering about the context for such shifts.

Many Americans noticed, for example, when the insalubrious contents of a laptop belonging to then-Presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son Hunter went from “Russian disinformation” to “authenticated by the Washington Post” in the time it took his father to beat Donald Trump at the polling booth. We’ll never know if burying that story swung the election. But it probably helped: an intuition that is, for many, just one more data point in the pattern of “neutrality” and “objectivity” serving as mere fig-leaves for partisan manoeuvring.

It’s common now to complain about the other side being guilty of “post-truth” politics, or to blame variously “woke tyranny” or “Right-wing authoritarianism” for the sense that truth has been replaced by something dismayingly slippery and chronically biased. But it’s a mistake to imagine that this is all the fault of whoever you consider your political enemies.

Free speech, objectivity, facts and the “marketplace of ideas” really are hopelessly compromised. But what killed them wasn’t Those Bad People Over There; it was the internet. It gave us too much information, and with it came attention politics. Now even the most die-hard defenders of political neutrality might as well lean into their own biases, because even if they don’t people will still notice them.

What we don’t know yet is how far it’s possible to go in forcing public assent to narratives that are flagrantly untrue. That’s ultimately a question of how completely a given elite is able to control the public sphere, in a hyper-mediated culture, if a critical mass of ordinary people doesn’t want to play ball. In any case, I suspect we’re on track to find out.

Costner was exaggerating but not by much. Around that time, 77% of Americans told pollsters that they believed that Lee Harvey Oswald was not solely responsible for the assassination of John F Kennedy in Dallas on 22 November 1963. Phrases from the case had long ago entered the national vocabulary: magic bullet, lone gunman, Zapruder film, grassy knoll, patsy.

Stone’s movie did not actually do much to shift the numbers. What it did do, in generating $205m, eight Oscar nominations and an almighty debate, was introduce a mainstream audience to the mindset of conspiracy theories: the obsessive accumulation of data, wild deductive leaps and spinning of yarns.

I know because I was one of them. JFK was my gateway drug into the thrillingly murky world of post-war dirty tricks and black ops, where I was often unable to distinguish between actual conspiracies such as Watergate and MK-ULTRA and fanciful speculation. As a reformed conspiracy theorist, I’m familiar with the seductive power of that adventure into an underworld where there are no coincidences, only connections. “My eyes have opened,” says Costner’s Garrison, “and once they’re open, believe me, what used to look normal seems insane.” And vice versa, of course.

JFK coloured a decade which, though remembered as relatively stable, was riddled with paranoia, from The X-Files to the fantastical Right-wing conspiracy theories swirling around the Clintons. Yet today, as Stone releases a 30^th anniversary documentary, JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, JFK’s legacy is even more complicated.

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Christopher Hitchens wrote that “modern American conspiracy theory begins with the Warren Commission”. In fact, the first counter-narrative was published within a month of the assassination. An article in the National Guardian by Mark Lane, a young lawyer hired by Oswald’s mother, caused a sensation in the UK as well as the US. Worthies including Labour MP Michael Foot, theatre critic Kenneth Tynan and historian Hugh Trevor-Roper promptly formed the Who Killed Kennedy Committee.

The Warren Commission, under pressure to reach a unanimous conclusion before the 1964 election, left many inconsistencies unaddressed and alternative perpetrators unexplored; ironically, its critics largely relied on the commission’s own published evidence, which ran to 27 volumes and 10.4 million words. Two years later, when Lane’s massive bestseller Rush to Judgment led a pack of anti-Warren books including Harold Weisberg’s Whitewash and Richard H Popkin’s The Second Oswald, half of Americans said that they disbelieved the commission’s lone-gunman theory.

Lane’s theories later inspired the 1973 movie Executive Action, a weirdly boring dramatisation of a hypothetical plot to kill Kennedy. By then, an an assassination completist would have amassed around 2,000 volumes of speculation about the accuracy of Carcano model 91 rifles, doppelganger Oswalds, Cuban exiles, mobsters and spooks. It was already, as Stone says in JFK Revisited, “the most thoroughly documented crime in American history”. By 1979, when the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) concluded that there was probably a conspiracy and (based on later discredited acoustical evidence) probably a fourth shot from the grassy knoll, Kennedy conspiracy theories were thoroughly mainstream. “Next thing you know they’ll be blaming World War II on Hitler,” joked talk-show host Johnny Carson.

The 25^th anniversary of the assassination, 1988, was a busy year. Don DeLillo, American literature’s great scholar of conspiracy and paranoia, fictionalised the story of Oswald and “the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century” in his bestselling novel Libra. In the UK, ITV broadcast The Men Who Killed Kennedy, a two-part documentary so tenuous that director Nigel Turner was censured by regulators.

This was also the year that Stone met a publisher and former Garrison staffer named Ellen Ray, who gave him a copy of Garrison’s book On the Trail of the Assassins. Until then, Stone told Esquire, “I thought that people like Mark Lane were crazy. I thought Lee Oswald had shot the president.” No longer. After giving Garrison a three-hour grilling, he optioned the book and plunged down the rabbit hole.

Garrison, as fans of the film will know, is still the only person to bring a criminal prosecution in relation to Kennedy’s murder, identifying a CIA-connected New Orleans businessman named Clay Shaw as a key conspirator. He failed. Newsweek called the 1969 trial “a merry kind of parody of conspiracy theories, a can-you-top-this of arbitrarily conjoined improbabilities”. Yet this patriotic military veteran who came to believe that his country had been betrayed at the highest level was to Stone the ideal protagonist for an “outlaw history or counter-myth” about the crime that marked the end of America’s innocence.

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That’s why Stone cast the Republican Costner as an all-American truth-seeker in the mould of James Stewart or Gary Cooper and commissioned a John Williams score that sounded like a Fourth of July parade passing through a horror movie. A Vietnam veteran, Stone believed that Kennedy would have averted the conflict, broken up the CIA and ended the Cold War, thus making the assassination nothing less than a coup d’etat. As Costner says in the movie: “The ghost of John F Kennedy confronts us with the secret murder at the heart of the American dream.”

Stone wanted to tell the story not just of Garrison’s investigation but of Oswald, Dealey Plaza and military escalation in Vietnam, to which end his research team consulted around 200 books of assassination lore. He pitched JFK to Warner Brothers’s Terry Semel (who had produced All the President’s Men and The Parallax View) as a Rashomon-style tapestry of conflicting perspectives rather than a coherent thesis. But that’s not the film he made.

In purely cinematic terms, JFK is a masterpiece of casting, editing, cinematography and storytelling. For a film which runs to 188 minutes (206 in the director’s cut currently available on Amazon Prime) and consists mostly of not just dialogue but lectures, it is both comprehensible and exhilaratingly watchable: part pseudo-documentary, part star-studded paranoid thriller. The ultimate effect is overwhelming, phantasmagorical, a bad dream.

Roger Ebert, a Warren sceptic and bullish supporter of the movie, argued that this eerie mood made JFK’s myriad historical inaccuracies and fabrications beside the point. “I want moods, tones, fears, imaginings, whims, speculations, nightmares,” he wrote in a retrospective piece. “As a general principle, I believe films are the wrong medium for fact.”

But did Stone agree? There are gestures towards ambiguity in JFK — Costner’s Garrison often signposts a theory with “Let’s suppose”, “My guess is” or “What if” — but we are obviously meant to believe that he is on the right track. “My own conclusions go harder and further than the film,” Stone admitted to Ebert.

Elsewhere, the director insisted: “We clearly differentiate between fact and theory in the film. Any person familiar with film techniques knows that when we cut to something like [Jack] Ruby picking up the bullet in the hospital in black and white, it’s a hypothetical image.” But this is disingenuous. Even if you assume that the average cinema-goer is au fait with the semiotics of film stock, JFK is too sense-alteringly fast and dense for cool-headed scrutiny. And some realistic-looking scenes, such as the manic hotel-room confession of Joe Pesci’s David Ferrie, are completely imagined. Compare it to David Fincher’s Zodiac, which evokes obsession and paranoia without cooking the historical books or pretending that its hero is not somewhat of a crank.

Still, it is hard not to feel sorry for Stone over the backlash against JFK, which began with Lardner’s article two months before the movie had finished shooting and rolled on throughout 1991. He was attacked in almost every major newspaper and magazine, and mocked on Saturday Night Live. Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association, went so far as to compare him to Leni Riefenstahl. “Saddam Hussein did not receive half the vituperation the op-ed crowd has aimed at JFK,” Ebert protested.

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Stone went on the counterattack, firing off a fusillade of angry letters to publications to defend his movie’s veracity, all of which were reprinted in JFK: The Book of the Film, a heavily annotated screenplay followed by 400 pages of press clippings. One recipient, the New York Times veteran Tom Wicker, had a pithy response: “The director of JFK is not, as he claims, an artist. He is a polemicist.”

I’d suggest he is (or was) both. Let’s suppose, in Garrisonian style, that just as conspiracy theorists claim there were two Lee Harvey Oswalds, there were two Oliver Stones: the artist who made the movie and the polemicist who defended it. My guess is that what seemed like a concerted effort to pre-emptively discredit JFK led him to identify too strongly with Garrison, a man of “lone-wolf integrity” who was “accused, pandered, ridiculed and humiliated”. So he doubled down on the movie’s claims and rejected the licence of fiction. He has been stuck in that defensive posture ever since. “There’s nothing in the movie that I would go back on,” he said in 2013.

With the release of JFK Revisited, the polemicist has decisively defeated the artist. More like the book of the film than the film itself, this investigative essay is earnestly insistent on backing up JFK’s claims with evidence declassified since 1991. “Conspiracy theory,” Stone declares, “has become conspiracy fact”. He promises to “piece together what really happened that day”.

Those are bold statements. In a way, JFK succeeded too well. As Stone had hoped, it led the creation of the Assassination Records Review Board, which has since released almost every piece of evidence gathered by the Warren Commission and the HSC; the process is due to conclude by December 2022. Yet to this day the only smoking gun is Oswald’s Mannlicher. There have been no decisive revelations, no incriminating leaks, no deathbed confessions to wrap things up. On the contrary, books such as Gerald Posner’s Case Closed and Vincent Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History have methodically debunked many of the claims in JFK.

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And so JFK Revisited feels like an old rock band on tour, mixing classic hits with underwhelming new material. Minus the artistry and stardust of the first movie, it resembles a high-end version of one of those YouTube documentaries which promises to tell you the truth about 9/11 or Covid-19. The assassination buffs interviewed by Stone are still effectively in the same position they occupied in 1966: capable of casting enormous doubt on the Warren Commission’s flawed account but unable to replace it with a convincing narrative of their own. They remind me of the researcher in Libra: “He knows he can’t get out. This case will haunt him to the end.” No wonder that the percentage of Americans who believe in a conspiracy has slipped from a high of 81% in 2001 to 61% now, or that the last major film about the assassination, Jackie, concentrated on grief rather than guilt. A theory cannot thrive on scraps forever.

But there is a darker context. Rewatching JFK made me nostalgic for a time when conspiracy theories seemed titillating, exotic and largely well-intentioned. These days, Stone’s once-reasonable request that viewers do their own research is the mantra of every crank. The anti-imperialist Left and authoritarian Right come together to smear the White Helmets and deny President Assad’s use of chemical weapons (Stone himself has praised Putin as a “stabilising force” in Syria). Donald Trump convinces tens of millions of his followers that the last election was stolen. A pandemic breeds theories about a “plandemic”. Alex Jones is sued for claiming that the Sandy Hook shootings were a hoax and the grieving families and survivors merely “crisis actors”. On and on. This mindset has poisoned the world.

The Kennedys are infected, too. Last month, QAnon believers gathered in Dallas to await the return of John F Kennedy Jr to become Donald Trump’s 2024 running mate. (Generally believed to have died in 1999, he did not show up.) Robert F Kennedy Jr, who appears in JFK Revisited, is America’s most influential anti-vaxxer.

“Conspiracy theory thus becomes an ailment of democracy,” Christopher Hitchens wrote sympathetically in 1991. “It is the white noise which moves in to fill the vacuity of the official version.” But we can see now that conspiracy theories spring up even when the official version is much more solid than the Warren report. Which authority is to blame for the obscene fantasies of Alex Jones? What space are QAnon or Pizzagate moving into except a zone of epistemological chaos — the ruins of our shared reality?

Thirty years on, it is clear that JFK is not remotely a good movie about the assassination but it is a peerless dramatisation of how it feels to be a conspiracy theorist. Perhaps that makes it more valuable than ever.

She noticed something. When she interviewed the men’s rights activists, she was enraged by their sexism: but when she went back and transcribed the interviews, she found that the things she had been enraged by were not as clear as she had thought. “I would often hear an innocent and valid point that a MRA would make,” she says, “and in my head I would add on a sexist or anti-woman spin, assuming that was what he wanted to say but didn’t.”

If a man said that there are 2,000 domestic violence shelters for women in the US and only one for men, for instance, she would hear “and therefore we should defund the women’s ones”, rather than “so we should fund more men’s ones”. It’s an interesting watch.

The blogger John Nerst points out that, whether or not you agree with her, there’s something interesting going on here. Her brain was doing something incredibly sophisticated. The MRAs’ comments were being filtered, or spun, or edited, before they reached her conscious mind. They were given tags: untrustworthy, sexist, anti-woman.

As far as her consciousness was concerned, she wasn’t choosing to label them like that: they came to her pre-labelled, by some hidden subroutine in the brain. It was only when she watched it back later, and her own video diaries from the time, that she was able to spot the labels. And the labelling involves quite high-level ideas, things like “misogyny”, not just lizard-brain concepts like “danger, food, potential mate”.

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By Tom Chivers

I thought of Jaye, and the strange filtering that our brains do, when I read about the probably nonexistent wave of ivermectin overdoses filling Midwestern US hospitals and preventing medics from treating gunshot victims.

This purported wave got a lot of coverage. Rolling Stone “Gunshot Victims Left Waiting as Horse Dewormer Overdoses Overwhelm Oklahoma Hospitals, Doctor Says.” The Guardian: “Oklahoma hospitals deluged by ivermectin overdoses, doctor says”. The Independent: “Doctor says gunshot victims forced to wait for treatment as Oklahoma hospitals overwhelmed by coronavirus patients.” It’s taken from a report from a local TV channel, which interviewed a rural Oklahoman emergency-room doctor.

As far as I can tell, it’s not true at all. Dr Jason McElyea, the doctor in question, appears to have been saying two things: 1) that he’s seen some ivermectin overdoses and 2) that emergency rooms are overwhelmed, presumably by Covid. The original news video splices these two points together, but I don’t think it’s what McElyea meant; in a follow-up interview with the BBC, he clarified that there was only a “handful” of overdoses, and that the strain on hospital staff was mainly from a surge in Covid cases. One Oklahoman hospital said it hadn’t seen any cases; others may have, but it makes it less likely that there’s a plague of the stuff. (It’s worth noting that Right-wing outlets didn’t cover themselves in glory either: they reported the hospital saying it hadn’t had any cases as disproving the whole story, even though McElyea had never mentioned that hospital and it was in a different bit of Oklahoma.)

To be clear, ivermectin almost certainly doesn’t help prevent or treat Covid and it can be bad for you. But it seems unlikely that there are so many people ingesting it that it’s affecting hospital capacity.

The American Association of Poison Control Centers has released data up to the end of August, showing a marked rise in ivermectin cases — about ten times as many this August as there were in August 2019. But while a tenfold rise sounds impressive, it’s only up from about 40 cases a month in 2019 to 450 a month now, and most of those cases had either no effect or minor effects. For context, about 1,600 people are being hospitalised with Covid every day in Oklahoma alone. It’s silly to take ivermectin, but people doing it are not putting huge strain on the US health service.

The ivermectin story is far from the only one recently. The Guardian among other places, recently reported a story of an “anti-trans Instagram post”, which made “unsubstantiated allegations” about a male-bodied person in a spa exposing themself to women and girls at an LA spa. The piece said experts called it “a case study in how viral misinformation can result in violence”, linking “anti-trans and far-right movements, including QAnon conspiracy theorists, who believe that a cabal of elite pedophiles is manipulating the American government”.

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There was a kind of inevitability about the follow-up story last week which found that, in fact, a registered sex offender named Darren Merager had been charged with indecent exposure at the spa. Merager, a trans woman, denies the charges; but at the very least, it’s not a clear-cut example of “viral misinformation” or a conspiracy theory worthy of being linked to QAnon.

As a bit of an aside, this isn’t supposed to happen. The Left views itself as the defender of truth and accuracy, not a purveyor of mistruth. Recently, I reviewed a book, How to Talk to a Science Denier. It was not, I felt, particularly useful. But one thing that I found revealing was the author’s long discussion of whether “left-wing science denial” existed. He chose one example — Left-wing opposition to genetically modified organisms, specifically on safety grounds — and concluded that it sort of did but not really. He based a lot of his thinking on the research of Stephan Lewandowsky, a psychologist at the University of Bristol. There is, I think, a fairly well-established idea that the Left is the “side” of science and evidence, and the Right is the “side” of science “denial”.

I find that strange, because I can think of quite a few areas in which elite Left-wing or liberal opinion doesn’t sit well with mainstream scientific findings.

For instance: the UK Green Party wants to “phase out” nuclear power. Is that “science denial”? I don’t know, but I think the consensus scientific position is that nuclear power is extremely safe and carbon-efficient.

And the idea that human behaviour and society are in some important way the product of evolution has been so profoundly uncomfortable to people on the Left that as far back as 1978 people broke into a lecture the biologist Edward Wilson, shouting “Racist Wilson, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide” and throwing water over him, after he had written a book, Sociobiology, which was mainly about the behaviour of insects but which speculated that future science could shed some light on human behaviour. Is that “science denial”? Well, again, that’s a question of definitions, but blank slatism is certainly not directly in line with modern scientific findings.

Or take IQ. Your score on an IQ test predicts your success in life pretty well; your career outcomes and earnings, your school results, even your lifespan. It’s also highly heritable. You can find people denying those facts on the Left much more easily than you can find them on the Right, just as you can find people claiming that biological sex isn’t real.

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My point isn’t that Left-wing people do this more than Right-wing people, or even that they’re equivalent: I suspect that if you could find some reasonable way of defining terms like “science denial” or “misinformation” (and “Right-wing” and “Left-wing”), you’d probably end up finding that it’s more prevalent on the Right. But, at least in the largely Left-wing or centrist circles I inhabit, it’s almost axiomatic that misinformation is what the Right do. There’s a serious strain of thought that thinks we are the correct ones, and they are the wrong ones.

But the desire to show your political opponents in the worst possible light, or to believe things that are politically convenient rather than things that aren’t, is entirely bipartisan. It’s just easier to spot when the enemy is doing it.

But what interests me is the question of whether people (on the Left or Right) do this on purpose: are they consciously misrepresenting their opponents and ignoring inconvenient truths, or is it a subconscious, automatic thing?

I wrote some months ago about people switching between different definitions of words in highly charged culture-war debates, allowing them to make claims like “cancel culture is/isn’t real”. I’d assumed it was mainly unconscious, but something that people said to me was: this is entirely deliberate. They define words in ways that gain them cultural power: so a Left-winger might very deliberately define “racism” to include “anything that leads to negative outcomes for non-white people”, and a Right-winger might define it as “only explicit acts of intentional racism by an individual”, so as to make the problem as big or as small as you can. Certainly it seems to happen too often for it to be accidental.

Under that model, people share the ivermectin story or the trans-woman-in-the-spa story to damage their political opponents, knowing or not caring that it’s not true. Ivermectin is a Right-coded thing, so showing that Trump-voting rural Oklahomans are taking it in their thousands and gumming up emergency wards shows just how stupid they are.

But the Cassie Jaye MRA thing, I think, reveals another angle. As Nerst describes it, Jaye’s conscious brain wasn’t choosing the most uncharitable interpretations of what the MRAs were saying: her subconscious brain only presented her with uncharitable options. Her conscious, reasoning mind, the bit of us that we consider ourselves, thought it was simply reporting reality, but in fact the version of reality that arrived in front of it had already been screened, and only the politically convenient bits were available to her. Nerst calls this process of only choosing from pre-screened options “semitentionality”: it’s neither an honest mistake nor a cynical misrepresentation, but some weird different third option.

I think that’s what’s going on when people read stories about ivermectin or trans women in spas. It’s not that they deliberately choose the interpretation most convenient to their pre-existing beliefs, or that they’re accidentally choosing the most convenient interpretation time and time again. It’s that the world our brains present to us is brilliantly constructed so that our friends are right and good and the enemy is bad and wrong. It’s not clear how we can improve the situation — but being wary of sharing any politically convenient stories on social media might be a good start.

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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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”.

It’s impossible, when observing the strange disorders of our current politics, not to feel we are trapped in an intervening period — between an old, discredited order and whatever follows it, for better or worse. It’s a crisis, as Gramsci famously wrote, which “consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” There is no popular faith still adhering to the old institutions — the political system, journalism, the church. And yet the alternatives rising up to succeed them — the political religions of the internet, the grifting hot-take economy — seem in many ways worse. Now, indeed, is the time of monsters.

In Edgelands, a new series of videos for UnHerd, I’ll explore the strange and unsettling manifestations of our new political era. Travelling across the country, and further afield, I’ll meet people on the edge of politics — conspiracy theorists, idealists, visionaries and eccentrics — who each in their own way encapsulate this political moment. Much of what we consider offbeat or kooky may have a wider appeal to ordinary people than the London media consensus realises. Perhaps, on the margins and in the hidden recesses of the internet, new political realities are being born which will come to shape all our lives.

For the first episode, I travel to the wild cliffs of Tintagel, on England’s mist-shrouded Atlantic fringe, to meet John Mappin, a scion of the Mappin & Webb jewellery dynasty whose engagement with the kookier fringes of American conservatism has raised eyebrows. A cloud of overwhelmingly negative headlines surrounds Mappin, mostly derived from his flying the flag of the QAnon conspiracy theory from the roof of his Cornish hotel, Camelot Castle.

QAnon adherents, followers of an American political religion birthed from the internet, believe that the world is run by a Deep State cabal of bloodthirsty paedophiles, against whom the saviour Donald Trump was locked in a secretly successful campaign. Representing American politics at its most alien and outlandish, through its overlap with anti-vaccine sentiment and Covid conspiracy theories, QAnon may have more reach in Europe than anyone at first expected.

But is Mappin really, as the headlines claim, the leader of Britain’s QAnon movement? Have the wilder reaches of American conservative politics taken root in Deep England? Or is Mappin a classic eccentric of a traditionally English type, the sort of utopian idealist that has always been drawn to the Celtic fringes, and to the blurry borderlands between myth and reality? Is he dangerous, as the headlines warn, or is he, in his own way, sincerely trying to build a better world?

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With more Twitter followers than the vast majority of journalists, and his own successful YouTube channel devoted to his worldview, Mappin is simultaneously a fringe figure and a genuine cultural phenomenon worthy of study. A product of the British establishment who has taken up the cause of anti-establishment populism, and whose beliefs are now shared by a discomforting number of people in Britain as well as America, Mappin is creating his own political reality from his clifftop castle.

Yet perhaps the standard response to this new politics — the recourse to the new breed of disinformation specialists and official fact checkers — is less productive than exploring these world views on their own terms, and trying to understand what drives them. Perhaps it’s only by exploring the fringes that we can fully understand the crisis of the centre, and discern the strange political futures taking shape within the mists. Welcome to Camelot Castle, and to Edgelands.

Kindness is one of those things that seems so obviously good that more must always be better — however much you start with. Telling other people to be kind qualifies as an act of kindness in itself, which a cynical person might point out is convenient, because otherwise being kind seems like a lot of work. (You have to think about what other people want and then do things for them! Exhausting!) But cynicism is itself not kind, which means kindness is hermetically defended against that line of attack.

Setting yourself up as an opponent of kindness would be extravagantly poor taste, especially now the hashtag #bekind is irrevocably associated with suicide prevention. This is unfortunate for me, because I am not a kind person; or at least, I don’t think of kindness as the quality I would like to be defined by or measured against in public life. I’m a critic, which makes it my job to say critical things.

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I think that paying attention to things — how they work, what they do, how people respond to them — is the highest sort of respect, even if sometimes you end up saying that the thing is flawed. Also, being mean is pretty funny. I’m very fond of Winnie the Pooh, but I’m even fonder of Dorothy Parker’s review: “And it is that word ‘hummy,’ my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Cornerat which Tonstant Weader Fwowed up.”

So I suppose I must be an enemy of kindness, and that forces me into a position on one of the great and endless battles of the discourse: in the confrontation of snark and smarm, I choose snark every time.

*

The last major snark vs. smarm skirmish took place in 2013, when the blog Gawker published an essay by Tom Scocca called “On Smarm”. “Smarm” was the term Scocca used to summarise a cultural attitude that had been developing since the turn of the century, and which Scocca identified particularly with the literary journal McSweeney’s, founded in 1998 and presided over by author Dave Eggers. “What is smarm, exactly?” asks Scocca, who then answers himself like this:

“Smarm is a kind of performance—an assumption of the forms of seriousness, of virtue, of constructiveness, without the substance. Smarm is concerned with appropriateness and with tone. Smarm disapproves.

“Smarm would rather talk about anything other than smarm. Why, smarm asks, can’t everyone just be nicer?”

One significant thing about McSweeney’s is that it’s always been partly a work of resistance to the internet — when people were making apocalyptic predictions about the demise of print, McSweeney’s was publishing beautiful and absorbing editions that could have no online equivalent (issue 13 has a dust jacket that unfolds to be a comic; issue 17 is a collection of letters and fake junkmail; issue 24 is Z-bound, so it reads as two books bonded back-to-back).

That goes for tone, as well as format. The internet had coalesced around a voice that was gossipy, knowing and sharp-tending-to-downright-abusive — the voice, in other words, of Gawker. Whereas if any one principle animated McSweeney’s, it was positivity — and how better to manifest positivity than by being against critics? McSweeney’ssister magazine The Believer for a time ran an online column called “Snarkwatch”, where authors could return fire at reviews they found unfair or displeasing. Eggers’ own position on criticism was summarised in this quote, which Scocca repeats in full:

“Do not be critics, you people, I beg you. I was a critic and I wish I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me, and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy. Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them.”

There are a lot of problems with this as an ethos, and Scocca points out the obvious one: Do not dismiss … a movie? Unless you have made one? Any movie? The Internship? The Lone Ranger? Kirk Cameron’s Unstoppable? But if you can’t dismiss a movie without making one, why should you be able to praise one either? If critical authority can only come from artistic creation, that should go both ways.

It’s also true that knowing how hard something is and being able to say how good something is are not always compatible. An author acquaintance once gave a positive review to a book which I’d dismissed because it looked twee. I read it; it was twee. When I gently asked my acquaintance about it, the explanation was that, no the book wasn’t great, but it was hard to dismiss another writer’s efforts. As a critic, though, I need to be on the side of the reader, and as a reader I need critics to be on my side. I don’t care how much sweat went into a book: I just want it to be good.

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This is one of the problems with “kindness” as a catchall value. Who, exactly, are you being kind to? If I’m sparing of a dull novel, that’s kind to the author, but less kind to readers who might spend their money on it. On the other hand, Gawker’s rapacious, consuming unkindness had already gone beyond “incisive” and into “intrusive” by 2013. In 2012, it published the infamous Hulk Hogan sex tape, which led to the Bollea [Hogan’s real name] v. Gawker lawsuit; this found in Bollea’s favour in 2016, leading to a settlement which bankrupted the company. The suit was financed by Peter Thiel, who had been outed by Gawker in 2007.

Some former adherents of the snark manifesto began to recognise its limitations. “Snark is not just a tool. It’s a habit,” wrote one, the Jeopardy! contestant turned liberal commentator Arthur Chu, in a 2015 post for Salon. “It’s the kind of habit that ends up with you doing indefensible things and then trying to defend them by saying you didn’t mean to.” Instead of binding himself to either snark or smarm, Chu concluded, “it’s the substance of the values I fight for that concerns me as a writer and a human being.”

Six years later, I wonder how that commitment is going. Here’s something Chu tweeted a few weeks ago, in reference to the fatal shooting of Ashley Babbitt by a police officer as she broke into Mike Pence’s office during the Capitol riots: “Ashley Babbitt feeding the worms is one of the few good things that happened as a result of the Capitol ‘protest’ and if you feel the need to mourn her Nazi ass it’ll be easier for both of us if you unfollow me now.” And there’s more where that came from:

“A Nazi is the opposite of a person, and therefore our morality to them must be reversed
To hate them is to love
To harm them is to heal
To kill them is to bring life”

How, exactly, does someone go from being a snarker to a snark apostate to tweeting that kind of 1984 murder fantasy nightmare?

*

I watched the video of Ashley Babbitt monologuing as she drove to the Capitol for what she expected would be a confrontation between the forces of good (her, Donald Trump, various adherents to the QAnon conspiracy theory she believed in) and evil (all non-Trump politicians, police, everyone else). I read the profiles of her, which quoted her loved ones, all of whom seemed baffled by her commitment to the belief system she would die for.

She didn’t seem like “the opposite of a human”. She seemed like someone unstable, damaged, susceptible to the cultish manipulations of QAnon. She seemed like a person who had acted violently and who had been killed because she constituted a present threat, but still — a person. I didn’t exactly mourn her (after all, I don’t know her and her shooting seems like an appropriate response in the circumstances), but I certainly felt some pangs that a woman could have got so snarled up in a deranged set of stories about pizza and paedophiles that she ended up dead.

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Because Ashley Babbitt believed, really and truly believed, that what she was doing was right. That when she went through that window, she was doing it to protect America and very specifically to protect children from being raped by senior Democrat politicians. She was on the side of kindness by her own lights; Chu, too, believed himself on the side of kindness when he celebrated her death. Once you’ve identified a certain cause or object as the essence of goodness, anything which threatens that cause or object is a justified target of any kind of attack.

That’s why the politician who called for “kinder, gentler politics” is the same politician whose supporters operated a reign of terror against anyone who criticised him. When, in an article about suffering a heart attack, the Guardian writer Rafael Behr mentioned that anti-Semitic abuse from Corbyn supporters had likely been one of the contributing stresses, the mass reaction of Corbyn supporters was to mock him and accuse him of exaggerating in order to harm Corbyn’s reputation.

Corbyn’s pretensions to kindness did not, as you might naively imagine, make these abusers reflect on their own unkindness. Instead, it spurred their own sense of righteousness: only a very bad person would invent such a terrible thing to hurt a kind old man like Corbyn. The cult of kindness is, in practice, a permission slip to be cruel. After all, by the law of negation, unkindness to the unkind must be the truest kindness.

The actor — Rupert Grint — made his claim to kindness to explain why he had repudiated JK Rowling, even though she is the author of the Harry Potter franchise that made him famous. Rowling had shared a long and thoughtful personal essay, in which she explained why her experience of male violence made her wary of conflating sex with gender identity and fearful of the erosion of women-only spaces. Grint’s only response to this was to express a desire to “get some kindness out there” by stating: “I firmly stand with the trans community.” In so doing Grint, very unkindly, dismissed a woman’s testimony of her own trauma.

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But then, kindness is gendered. Women are the ones who are supposed to be kind, to give of themselves, to play the universal mother and make other people happy. People find it particularly shocking when a woman refuses to be kind: there’s something unnatural, offensive about a female mouth declaring that the limits of her care are here and she will not be giving any more.

I resent the demands for kindness partly because they fall particularly on me due to my sex, but also because I think that kindness is lacking. It is an inadequate virtue. If all you mean by “kindness” is “the absence of cruelty”, then I suppose I am for it because I am against harassment and violence and telling people they deserved their heart attack because they were mean about Jeremy Corbyn. But in reality “kindness” is used to mean “the absence of criticism”. It means a kind of pandering.

Pandering is an error. There are things in the world that are faulty and wrong and sometimes (like Ashley Babbitt’s conspiracies) absolutely dangerous. However beloved these things are, however well-meaning, however sacred they are considered by some — they still need to have holes poked in them. And, when all the holes have been poked, if the thing cannot stand up, it needs to be discarded.

I don’t mean to suggest that by being a critic, I’m waging some kind of crusade against the forces of delusion. Most of the time, I’m just trying to tell you what I think about something and make a few jokes along the way. Sometimes I’m being a bitch, which is a word that specifically designates “unkind woman”. A life defined only by kindness is a soft, stunted, incurious one, and probably a dishonest one too. We are all capable of being cruel and wrong. It’s the ones who believe their ideology or intentions put them beyond fault that you really have to look out for.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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”.

“I had a vision of a world without Batman,” he muses. “And it was soooo…. boring.”

Today, the American Left is faced with a similar crisis. Donald Trump is, perhaps needless to say, not Batman. (Much as he might like to think otherwise.) But he is interesting, and for quite some time he’s played an essential role in motivating his opponents to action. After all, there’s no Resistance without a powerful force to throw one’s weight against.

For four years, Democrats and a handful of Republicans have looked forward to Trump’s defeat, and with it, an end to the fight. Only now, with the war won and a new president in office, it seems that nobody wants to let go. Not Donald Trump, who spent the last months of his presidency claiming to have been robbed, fomenting insurrection, and getting himself banned from every social media platform — but not his opponents either.

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Biden is the white knight women don't need

By Kat Rosenfield

Trump, with his trashy aesthetics, vulgar xenophobia and thin-skinned arrogance, was the perfect villain. We couldn’t have invented a better one if we’d tried (although we occasionally did anyway, embellishing his idiocy until it became the stuff of legend). And while a free and fair election evicted him from the White House, all evidence indicates that he’s still living rent-free in our heads. We’re not done; we’re still so angry. Where is all that pent-up emotion supposed to go?

A look at the cultural landscape suggests a transference is taking place, with the loathing rippling outward to land on anyone Trump-adjacent. The society pages have taken up jeering at the President’s various progeny, particularly Ivanka and Jared, whose impending social death amongst the New York elite is the stuff schadenfreude is made of. “Ivanka Trump apparently thinks she’s going to ride this insurrection out and be president one day,” reads one Vanity Fair headline. At the same time, political activists are intent on hounding Trump’s enablers out of public life; in publishing, a petition to bar anyone in the administration from receiving book contracts is currently amassing signatures.

But more than Trump’s friends and family, it’s the still-active MAGA masses who will bear the brunt of our displaced rage. Imagine Trump being toppled from his presidential pedestal and shattering into a thousand sentient pieces, a scurrying horde of mini-Trumps, all with targets on their backs. The several hundred idiots who stormed the Capitol may have failed to overturn the election, but they’ve given new purpose to a cadre of online progressives who want to play Poirot. An entire community has sprung up, devoted to identifying the rioters foolish enough to attempt a coup unmasked and on camera. The pink-hatted women who marched en masse against Trump in January 2016 have found a new calling this year, honey-trapping the rioters on dating apps and reporting them to the FBI.

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What will the New York Times do when Trump goes?

By Sam Leith

Meanwhile, the Left’s calls to defund the police have fallen abruptly silent; instead, we fantasise about more laws, more cops, more ways to wield our newfound authority against these Trumpist transgressors.The protest movement that defined us last year, the mass national outcry against police impunity and unbridled authoritarianism? As it turns out, these things are only a problem if you’re not the person in power. “I hope he can hear the sirens approaching at this very moment,” tweets a self-described advocate for democracy and social justice after one rioter is identified. Another replies, “I hope he hears nothing; a black SUV pulls up along side him at the grocery parking lot, a bag over his head, and they speed off to an undisclosed location.”

Is this Donald Trump’s legacy? Have those of us who thought we were fighting a monster become one ourselves? Six months ago, progressives marched against police overreach and scolded their fellow citizens for calling the cops on looters. Today, these same people fantasise openly about seeing the MAGA rioters behind bars. Activists who used the public sphere of social media to transform a hashtag campaign into a global movement for justice now celebrate the silencing of their political opponents.

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Make way for the first female President

By Kat Rosenfield

And journalists, who have spent four years proclaiming their commitment to boldly speaking truth to power, seem to have forgotten that this is still their job, even when that power has been transferred into the hands of someone they prefer. This shift was already apparent in the lead-up to the election: compare the breathless coverage of Trump’s alleged sexual misconduct, from the Access Hollywood tape to the Stormy Daniels scandal, to the general scepticism that greeted Tara Reade’s allegations of sexual assault by Joe Biden; or the gleeful speculation surrounding Trump’s Russia collusion to the poo-pooing of the peculiar contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop.

But the contrast has been even starker in the months following the election, as some journalists reversed course and decided that they were true patriots after all. Questioning the validity of the election, a favourite pastime back in late 2016, became taboo verging on treason. Faithless electors, once hailed as the great hope for an against-all-odds Hilary Clinton presidency, were now scrutinised as seditionists.

When Trump’s supporters rushed the Capitol, some reporters not only compared it to September 11, but cheered the notion of a Patriot Act-style crackdown on the so-called “domestic terrorists”. Granted, these “terrorists” did not topple any buildings that day, but they did throw an unprecedented tantrum that frightened our lawmakers and got several people killed. Washington Post columnist Max Boot was one of many journalists who called on on our new government overlords to urgently step in: “Biden needs to reinvigorate the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] to slow the lies and sedition from Fox and other right-wing broadcasters,” he tweeted. “Or else the terrorism we saw on Jan. 6 may be only the beginning, rather than the end, of the plot against America.”

The fact that this “terrorism” looked less like an organised movement, and more like a group of dogs who unexpectedly, improbably caught the car they were chasing, is irrelevant. In fact, it’s an American tradition: if no genuine plot against the country exists, we can always invent one, cobbled together from scraps to look like something real. A secret Iraqi bunker full of weapons of mass destruction; a secret coup being plotted deep in the bowels of QAnon and Parler.

We have spent four years in a state of energising, symbiotic hatred; we can’t just let it go. Battling Trump gave us a sense of purpose, and in some cases, even a sense of self. Winning, on the other hand, is a dull affair with boring prizes — so much so that many of us are would rather stay where we are, unwilling to declare victory, grinding our defeated opponents into smaller and smaller pieces until there’s nothing left to punish. We are chasing the dragon of outrage just to feel alive again. The fight was what united and defined us. What’s a Resistance warrior to do?

But for anyone who has studied the history of organic and local food movements (as I did while writing my book, Ending Hunger), their apparent endorsement by a far-Right conspiracy theorist might actually seem rather appropriate. For when you start to explore how they came about, things soon get surprisingly dark.

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Brexit is a betrayal of Britain's farmers

By James Rebanks

Let’s start with today’s fashion for “eating local”, which conjures up images of idyllic farmers’ markets stacked high with beautifully fresh seasonal produce. The pervasive idea that food should be grown locally can be traced back to the Reverend Thomas Malthus. Perhaps better known for his false predictions of Victorian population catastrophe, Malthus was also instrumental in implementing the Corn Laws in 1815, protecting the price of grain by the imposition of strict tariffs on imported produce.

Like many at the time, Malthus believed that if foreign grain — particularly that being grown in the vast new farms across the Atlantic — came to the UK without restriction, British farmers would soon go out of business. And so Malthus believed that British agriculture must be protected. But the Corn Laws were also designed to protect the status quo for wealthy landowners: they artificially raised the price of basic foods, keeping rural workers in poverty while landowners counted their cash. By 1846, the devastating results were clear — food prices had risen and famine was tearing through Ireland — and the laws were repealed.

Yet in many ways, our desire for self-sufficiency has an even more unpalatable history, one rooted in the nationalism and fascism of the 1930s. It started with Mussolini’s infamous “Battle for Grain”, which was a drive to remove dependence on foreign imports. But it was really under the Nazis that buying local gained its firmest roots. For his part, Hitler had an almost visceral aversion to relying on imports, strongly believing that losing the home front in the First World War — thereby destroying Germany’s trade routes — was ultimately the reason his country lost.

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Did the French Revolution cause Nazism?

By John Lewis-Stempel

In Mein Kampf, Hitler outlined how foreign policy should centre on obtaining more land to grow food for the German people. Particularly in his sights were the extensive wheat-producing areas of Russia’s “bread basket”, the Ukraine. The Nazi ideal of “Blood and Soil’ was most explicitly teased out in a book by Richard Walther Darré, a Nazi physician who would later become Hitler’s minister of agriculture. As well as being a staunch eugenicist, Dr Darré was a local food enthusiast, arguing that only produce specifically grown on German soil was suitable for the German people. He claimed that the supposedly superior Aryan race had a deep connection with the landscape and produce of its homeland, and must be fed from there alone.

Key in Darré’s writing was an idolisation of German agricultural workers as the country’s backbone, something that tapped into a pervasive early 20th-century distrust of urban living. This is classic retrograde, appeal-to-nature bullshit, a theme that sadly persists in much environmental and food writing today. In Nazi Germany, the hatred of cities was often a coded reference for hatred of Jews, who throughout Europe had been prevented from buying land and so largely lived in urban areas. A mystical connection between the German people and their soil ran directly counter to the lives of nomadic Jewish and Romany populations.

And as we’ve seen in recent years, much of this rhetoric resonates in the far-Right today. In 2017, for example, at a “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Neo-Nazi groups were heard chanting “blood and soil”. It resurfaced again later the same year during the “White Lives Matter” march at Shelbyville. Then, in 2019, after the horrific Christchurch shooting in New Zealand, the perpetrator was found to have described himself as an ‘”ecofascist” in his manifesto.

Of course, many local food movements have emerged without poisonous political associations. But it is always worth questioning why we assign such fads a unity of virtues. A love of a country’s food, nature or produce can be a profound and beautiful thing. But it can also be the acceptable face of insular nationalism, leading otherwise reasonable people to sit on common ground with ideologies they despise.

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How coronavirus exposes our fragility

By James Kirkup

The truth is that we should produce the best food that we can within a given region, and trade with the rest of the world to ensure the optimum diet for all. Although many will consider this an affront to our national identity, the UK simply is not well suited for agriculture, with a shortage of high-quality land, unpredictable rainfall and a lack of sunlight. We have not been self-sufficient in food for the past two hundred years, and currently import around 40% of all the calories we consume.

Evidence that eating local produce is better for the planet is also surprisingly thin. Even at its highest, in countries such as the US and UK, transport generally only represents around 11% of the greenhouse emissions of food production. The energy required to heat local hothouses often vastly exceeds the energy required to ship produce from warmer countries, and minimising transport often does not minimise environmental impact.

A wider selection of foods from a more diverse area has also benefited people’s health. In many areas, deficiencies in the soil can lead to deficiencies in the diet if people are restricted to local produce. In Derbyshire, just a few miles from where I am writing, alkaline soils strongly bind iodine, stopping it from getting into plants. For hundreds of years, goitre, an enlarged thyroid gland caused by iodine deficiency, was known as ‘Derbyshire Neck’, such was its prevalence in the county.

But if the virtue assigned to eating locally is misplaced, surely Chansley — who calls himself Jake Angeli – is right to favour organic produce instead? Not quite. For this movement also has troubling associations with fascism. It dates back to the 1920s, when biodynamic farming — an early offshoot of the burgeoning organic movement — was pioneered by Rudolf Steiner. An Austrian anti-Semite who created a pseudoscientific theory of “root races” to justify ideas about Aryan superiority, Steiner also believed that the persecution of Jews was part of their “inner destiny”.

Towards the end of his life, in 1925, Steiner developed his theories of agricultural practice, still known today as “biodynamic”. Much of this was entirely sensible and ahead of its time, focusing on the importance of continued soil fertility rather than crop yields, and viewing the farm as an ecosystem rather than a food-growing medium.

Rudolf Hess was a particularly ardent fan, and many of the Third Reich leaders were strong advocates of biodynamic agriculture. Steiner’s thinking strongly influenced the so-called Green Wing of the Nazi Party, and a biodynamic plantation was set up at Dachau to produce materials for SS doctors carrying out ‘experiments’. Much of this early development information fails to make the websites of the various biodynamic associations around the world.

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Why Britain needs a million new farmers

By Aris Roussinos

But of course, if organic production actually reduces the environmental impact of food, most of us would probably forgive its disturbing past. From an environmental perspective, the evidence in favour doesn’t look great. Many studies have been conducted, and the balance seems to show that per unit of food, organic farming produces more greenhouse gases, uses more land, has higher rates of nutrient run-off and is worse for acidification of soil.

Yet there’s much about organic agriculture that is entirely sensible. As Chansley will no doubt tell you, it recognises the importance of soil health and looks at the farm as a system, rather than a hydroponic medium for plant growth. It also often finds new ways to control pests and weeds, many of which may help combat the increasing threat of pesticide resistance.

Too often, however, organic practice — just like the trend for buying local — is not based on the best available evidence, but on a toxic mix of cultural privilege, mysticism and a rejection of modernity. If there really are some benefits to these movements, they should resist the desire to return to an imagined past. After all, that past really isn’t something in which we should take pride.

It was the most serious riot since the time of the Vietnam War. It was the most shameful day in the history of the United States since the Civil War. It was the worst desecration of the great citadel of American democracy since the British had torched it in 1812. The stunned invocations of these episodes reflected the degree to which Americans, far from living solely in the present, as the stereotypes so often have it, are in truth profoundly conscious of the distinctive character of their past. For Trump is being judged — by both his supporters and his enemies — at the bar of how Americans, over the span of their country’s existence, have understood what it means to be the citizens of a free republic.

In the immediate aftermath of the storming of the Capitol, no one articulated this perspective more powerfully than the senior senator from Colorado, Michael Bennet. Only a few hours after he had been bundled to safety by anxious security agents, he returned to the Senate floor, and there, surrounded by the wreckage of the day’s attack, gave a speech in which he placed the scenes of chaos in the broadest possible context. “One of the things I was thinking about today,” he said, “is something I often think about when I’m on this floor, which is that the Founders of this country, the people that wrote our Constitution, actually knew our history better than we know our history.”

Specifically, Bennet went on to say, they had laboured to fashion a republic in full awareness of the fact that they were not the first to embark on such a project. The existence of a senate and a Capitol in Washington speaks as loudly today as it did back in 1800 of the particular model at the forefront of the Founding Fathers’ minds. The neo-classical splendour of the Capitol – columns, marble portrait busts and all – was consciously designed to evoke the example of ancient Rome.

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The day QAnon captured America

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

The parallels, of course, are not entirely reassuring. If Rome has always provided the West with the supreme archetype of a great empire, then so also does it serve us as the exemplar of an empire that declined and fell. Photos of Trump’s goons carrying spears and sporting horns have had all the greater an impact for the gilded marble that provided them with their backdrop. It gave to the invasion of the Capitol a flavour of a sword-and-sandals epic. Selfie after selfie was touched by a hint of the menacing flavour that, from Hollywood to Las Vegas, has long been a feature of how Americans popularise ancient history. Here, it seemed, was a Visigoth climbing the pediment of a statue; there a Gaul slouching on the seat of a senator. To look at them was to imagine that the rioters had not merely invaded the Capitol, but – in the manner of authentic Vandals — put it to the sack.

Except, of course, that the rioters were themselves Americans. More than that — they were Americans who had invaded the Capitol in the conviction that, by interrupting the business of the Senate, by hunting down the enemies of the President, they would be helping to make America great again. It was this reflection, when Michael Bennet looked about him from the Senate floor, that turned his thoughts to Rome. It was not the fall of the Roman empire, dismembered by invaders, that perturbed him. The senator was looking back much further in time.

Originally, in its earliest days, Rome had been a monarchy; but then, freedom-loving, patriotic and resolute, the people had risen up and expelled their king. Liberty — the liberty of a people who had no master — had duly been consecrated as the birthright and measure of every Roman. The freedom of one was the freedom of all. Only by seeing himself reflected in the gaze of his fellows could a citizen truly know himself a man. Public business — res publica — came to define the kind of state that Rome had become. This, in the wake of the American Revolution, was the model of a republic most familiar to the classically educated men who drafted the Constitution.

Yet the history of the Roman Republic, even as it provided inspiration, also served as a warning. For many centuries, the great ideal of shared citizenship had encouraged the Romans to temper their competitive instincts for the common good. To place personal honour above the interests of the entire community was seen as the behaviour of a barbarian — or worse yet, a king. Gradually, however, over the course of the centuries, this taboo began to lose its hold. The more of a superpower the Roman Republic became, and the richer the potential pickings on offer to its most powerful men, so the more it began to totter under the weight of its own greatness. The bonds of shared citizenship stretched, then frayed, then snapped. Rome imploded into civil war. The venerable edifice of her republican system of government was reduced to rubble. And in its place an autocracy emerged: the rule of the Caesars. The lesson offered was a sombre one, and weighed heavily on the minds of the Founding Fathers. Last week, as he spoke to his shell-shocked fellow senators, and sought to rally them to a consciousness of their place in history, it weighed as well on the mind of Michael Bennet.

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America is the greatest story ever told

By Tom Holland

It was hardly surprising, in the wake of an armed attempt to frustrate the legal election of a President, that the senator should have focused on one particular dynamic in the troubled final decades of the Roman Republic: the readiness of rival factions to whip up mobs. This, it turned out, was a game that anyone could play. In 121 BC, the attempt by an elected official, Gaius Gracchus, to push for radical reforms in favour of the poor, and recalibrate the balance of power between the elites and the people, was met by conservatives with a murderous display of violence. Twelve years after an attempt by Gaius’ brother to push through similar reforms was foiled by his assassination, Gaius himself was clubbed to death with a stool-leg. His corpse was decapitated, and lead poured into his skull. In the wake of his murder three thousand of his followers were executed without trial.

It was to prove a fateful step. Conservatives were soon finding that they had won a pyrrhic victory. Since political divisions in Rome were a matter less of policy or ideology than of style, there were plenty of senators who preferred instead to address ‘deplorables’ over the heads of the traditional elite. These populares, as they were called, tended to be no less wealthy or aristocratic than their opponents; but they did, almost by definition, display a talent for speaking the language of the common man. This enabled them, in the wake of the murder of the Gracchi, to follow where conservatives had led.

It is no coincidence that Julius Caesar, the most successful of all the populares, also proved the most effective at intimidating rival senators. Mobs were employed to empty buckets of excrement over them; to howl them down whenever they tried to speak; to drive them into exile. The most charismatic of the mobsters employed by Caesar to serve his interests, an aristocrat-turned-plebeian named Clodius, blazed a particularly flamboyant trail. Shrugging aside accusations of incest, sacrilege and cross-dressing, he displayed an innovative talent for organising rioters into paramilitaries. His enemies were forced to do the same. Rome became the scene of endless street battles. Clodius’ murder in one of these clashes brought them to the very heart of the Republic. His followers, outraged by the fall of their hero, went on the rampage. They invaded the Senate House, plundered all its records, then set it on fire. The flames consumed not only the Senate House itself, but also Rome’s first permanent law court. The Capitol, seen in the light of such history, can be reckoned to have got off lightly.

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Restorations always fail

By Peter Franklin

Naturally, America is not Rome. The chasm of difference that separates the two republics is immense. Any parallels drawn between them are bound to be hazy at best, and at worst grotesque. The United States may boast senators, but it has none of the consuls or praetors mentioned by Michael Bennet in his speech. Was what he had to say on the floor of the Senate, then, merely tendentious? Not at all. This was because, eloquently and appropriately, it drew attention to the way in which, from the very beginnings of the American Republic, there has always been an element of role-playing about its politics.

None of the rioters who invaded the Capitol last week, not even the QAnon shaman in his buffalo horns, was more strikingly dressed than the sculpture of George Washington that back in 1832 was commissioned by Congress to mark the centennial of the first President’s birth. Horatio Greenough’s statue, now in the National Museum of American History, originally sat in the Rotunda of the Capitol, and portrayed Washington as the physical intersection point of twin republics: the American and the Roman. His wig is off-set by a toga; his raised right finger by the sword he holds in his left hand. It is comical, but also oddly moving.

To play at being a Roman was not, for the Founding Fathers, mere affectation. “Soon as this great work was done,” wrote Parson Weems, author of the first biography of Washington, “he took an affectionate leave of his gallant army and returned to cultivate his four acres.” Weems, when he wrote this, was not describing Washington but a Roman. Cincinnatus, a statesman summoned from his plough to save Rome, and who, after his duty done, laid done his office and returned to his fields, was a figure who served his countrymen as the very archetype of civic virtue. Gruelling and implacable though the contest to excel in Roman politics always was, there could be no place in it for ill-disciplined vainglory. The example of the past created a sense of responsibility that prevented a Roman’s sense of competition from degenerating into mere selfish ambition.

America’s Founding Fathers, looking to the nobility of this political tradition, did their best to transplant it to a continent undreamed of by the Romans. The desire to root it deeply so that it would not succumb to the blights of mob-rule and autocracy was indeed, as Senator Bennet said, what they “were thinking about when they wrote our Constitution”. Yet so accustomed are we to associate America with excess that it took the events at the Capitol to bring home to many of us that its political culture has, above all, always been marked by the acknowledgement and acceptance of limits. Those limits were what Trump, impatient with anything that frustrates his vanity, so heedlessly sought to trample down last week.

Fortunately, he is no Caesar, and the American republic is not the Roman. If anything, the attack on the Capitol, precisely because it was so shocking, has served Americans as a bracing reminder of just how fortunate they are to enjoy the political traditions that they do. The greatest punishment inflicted on Trump is likely to be, not a second impeachment, not prison, not even banishment from Twitter, but one far more enduring: to serve as an object of obloquy, and a standing lesson, in the annals of American history.

This scene was broadcast across the globe — and I imagine many people looked upon it with a certain kind of awe, as I have looked upon footage of the botched Gullenist coup in Turkey in 2016, or the live-streamed terrorist attacks around Paris in 2015. This is history, live. A state is being challenged. But this time the world got to see it happening in the most important country in the world, the United States. The added frisson must have been delectable. Not only “this is history”, but perhaps, this is a symbol of a changing world order. Or, maybe, this is a fate richly deserved, comeuppance for a puffed-up hegemon who arrogantly elected an obnoxious oaf as the leader of the free world.

Every which way it was gripping to watch; the whole ragtag look enjoyably daft. And the world learned: this is what the world’s superpower looks like right now. The most powerful country on earth can see its Senate dispersed, its election results delayed, and its Vice President fleeing for protection from a relatively small rabble that was entirely unarmed, save for their memes.

One could say that Q Shaman and his friends had been sent to the Senate by Donald Trump himself, to hunt out the Vice President. In the day before these events, Trump had taken his White House pressure campaign public. Having failed to uncover evidence of voter fraud, the Trump campaign had tried to disqualify votes or whole states from the 2020 presidential election with bizarre legal theories. Maybe the election violated American civil rights, or wasn’t scrutinising mail-in ballots differently at least? American courts, many of them staffed with judges Trump appointed, rejected these theories.

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Whose weird world are we living in?

By Mary Harrington

The latest idea, one that had been circulating widely among conspiracy theory social media accounts associated with QAnon, focused on the Vice President. The Queueties held that Mike Pence had the power to keep Trump as president. The 12th Amendment specifies that the President of the Senate — the Vice President — counts the certified votes of the Electoral College. Pence, they believed, could simply refuse to count the votes from Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia and so on. Technically, the sitting Vice President could annul all 50 states and disenfranchise 150 million or more voters. Couldn’t he? Trump warmed to the theory.

It’s not even clear whether Constitutional interpretation interests QAnon. For those who don’t know the conspiracy theory, Q holds that Donald Trump is confronting the malevolent people — many of them paedophiles — who want to politically enslave us, and that he is succeeding. Most of the news is just a shadow of the real events: the pandemic, the death of a GOP Congressman from Covid-19, and the harassment of Senator Josh Hawley were all planned volleys in this ongoing shadow war between good and evil. In this black and white moral battle, Mike Pence was the only character whose ultimate loyalties were unknown. One could tally the evidence up either way. Stay tuned!

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QAnon is indestructible

By Gavin Haynes

Donald Trump spoke about Mike Pence exactly this way at the pre-riot rally, emphasising the forthcoming turn of the plot and heightening the drama. “If Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election… ” Trump said: “All Vice President Pence has to do is send it back to the States to recertify, and we become president, and you are the happiest people.”

Pence released a letter confirming that he obviously did not have constitutional powers to overrule the people in an election. Within a few hours, he would be rushed out of the Senate chamber for his safety. And Trump tweeted:

The American public is in many ways inured to Trump, having long internalised his generally high level of bullshit. But in a day of many strange happenings, the president publicly accusing the Vice President of participating in the overthrow of the American form of government has to rank in history somewhere.

Most of the MAGA occupiers were not violent. They simply walked into the Capitol building after the initial violent wave caused the overmatched Capitol police to retreat.  Many were unlikely to know the stranger menagerie of second and third-tier internet rabble rousers who strolled into Congressional offices with them. Legislative staffers who remained in their offices boarded up their doors, waiting for an all-clear from the police. In an affray near the Senate Chamber, a young woman was shot and killed by Capitol police; Trumpers are now echoing their BLM counterparts with demands to “say her name”.

Her name was Ashli Elizabeth Babbitt. She was 35 years old and a veteran of the Air Force. Three others died of medical complications in the melee.

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National Populism is here to stay

By Michael Lind

Here I must admit that, like several other contrarians, I believed that the danger for America was likelier to come in the form of resistance to Trump, rather than from Trump himself. I read the many prestige publications fantasising about “toppling” Trump as child-like fantasies, the liberal inteligentsia’s vain hope for the villain to finally reveal the depth of his wickedness at the culmination of the story. By doing so, Trump would justify not just his removal, but discredit all his supporters forever.

And forgive me but I still believe it.

Had Trump narrowly prevailed in the Electoral College, I believe hundreds of thousands of the resistance would have gathered in Washington DC and a reprise of the summer’s unrest would have flamed out across the country. This demonstration would have sought to provoke the kind of precipitating events that led to a government losing “moral legitimacy”. The sentiments of this resistance would have had the backing of the powers and principalities in American life. As bad as the brief reign of Q Shaman was, I still think that this Wednesday’s ragtag farce of an insurrection was easier to put down than the alternative.

And yet, the bedlam in Washington D.C. cannot be unseen. A relatively small rabble quickly seized the Capitol from retreating law enforcement. They ran wild in the offices of our elected government. If any rival power was lucky enough to have a capable operative and a thumb drive in DC today, our Congress got pwned today. America’s friends, frenemies and rivals saw these events. You think Angela Merkel is having any second thoughts about the investment agreement with China after this? I don’t.

And then there is Q Shaman himself, and what he represents. Q types will simply present their followers little snippets and clips of the news in a slightly twisted context. The story of the congressman who died of Covid and the story of a protest — maybe an Antifa mob‚ at Senator Josh Hawley’s house are linked to events like the Electoral College certification. And the human mind, talented at pattern formation, will fill in the gaps, and construct for itself the impression that there is a shadowy war between the forces aligned with Trump and the forces that oppose him, with real drama and real casualties.

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When will my fellow liberals learn?

By Mark Lilla

What Q is doing is just intensifying and slightly re-shaping the common experience of social media, where snippets of outrage and fear are torn slightly out of context and linked together across the most addictive parts of the platforms like Instagram “stories”. Our pattern-making minds work on this constant stimulus, leading us to ever-more adamantine convictions, unshakable suspicions and disquieting fears.

Perhaps my own belief that a liberal insurrection would have been worse than this is one of these confected convictions, imprinted on me by the collision of my biases with the overstimulation of internet media. I can’t discount that possibility.

No one should forget the disgrace and danger that President Trump inflicted on America yesterday. But the thing that will keep me up at night is the knowledge that, in an instant, these confected beliefs and lurid fantasies can leap out of Facebook and Instagram and cause my countrymen to simulate the overthrow of my government. This is a psychological weapon, and somebody is going to learn to use it more effectively. Q Shaman reigned for an instant, and I’ll always wonder if he’s coming back.

On December 17, Martin apparently had a phone call from one ‘Captain Video’, from outer space, telling her that a saucer was to land in her backyard to pick her up, at four that afternoon, just before the end of the world. When the ship didn’t come, Martin and her rapidly-assembled coterie fell into despair. But then they discussed the matter further, and realised that the true meaning of the message had been that salvation would come later that day.

So it went on. On December 21, while yet again waiting for the spaceship that would save them when the earth was destroyed at precisely 12pm, it was suggested that perhaps the lounge clock they were timing the planet’s destruction by was wrong. Thus, the room of true believers waited for a second, slower clock to chime midnight, fingers presumably in ears. When, still, nothing happened, it was agreed amongst them that God in his infinite mercy had decided to save everyone. This time.

In terms of their own timeline QAnon is now perhaps at its first midnight clock. That makes this week both a fecund and an unnerving time for believers. Unnerving, because there is as yet no word from the high priest. “Q”, the anonymous figure who speaks the revelations that hold QAnon together — supposedly someone inside the Trump White House with high, ‘Q-level’ security clearance — has remained silent since polling day. His movement is a lifeboat drifting.

The last post in Q’s preferred receptacle — a messageboard on extreme speech site 8kun — was on November 3. It was a photo of a swimming pool-sized US flag on a hill, entitled “largest_flying_flag_in_america.jpg”; a quote from the Gettysburg Address: “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom  and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth”; and the words: “Together we win”.

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Is QAnon on the brink of power in America?

By Travis View

But the prophecy failed. Winning was not what happened. Ostensibly, Trump has now lost. So, what hope is there for those who believe he is the last line of defence against a Deep State paedophile conspiracy? Will he still be held up as the Lion of Judah when he’s reduced to hosting chat and light entertainment on Trump TV in 2021?

For now at least, like Trump himself, most believers remain in the denial phase. It’s easily done, at a time when the line between QAnon and not, between Republican and kook, is more blurred than it has ever been. The President continues to regularly erupt on Twitter over illegal voting. His son Eric posts discredited images of someone ‘burning 80 Trump ballots’. Even Republican moderates are perturbed by the vertical Philadelphia vote spike and the Sharpies in Arizona. Trumpist clickbait blog The Gateway Pundit has been making hay while the conspiracies shine with stories like “System ‘Glitch’ Also Uncovered In Wisconsin: Reversal Of Swapped Votes Removes Lead From Joe Biden”, making reference to an original ‘glitch’ in Michigan’s Antrim County that mistakenly awarded 6000 votes for Trump to Biden.

If Trump has his way, somewhere within that cacophony of allegation, the courts will now magnify a few grains of truth.

This would be easier to disentangle if there weren’t also a vague sense that the media are playing their own kind of fast and loose to hasten Trump’s departure. “It is totally impossible!” said Trump’s attorney Rudi Giuliani, discussing the six contested states that all seem to have edged for Biden in his video stream, Rudi Giuliani’s Common Sense. “Illogical. Irrational. That the same thing would happen in all five or six places where there were close votes.” USA Today reported that Giuliani was “ranting” in “a bizarre internet video” with “ink-stained hands”, but a quick inspection will show a fairly solemn version of the ex-mayor, with fairly clean hands, poring over tables of Arizona voters rolls.

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Facebook is radicalising your parents

By Gavin Haynes

And so, the mainstream media muddies the water, creating a perfect cover for QAnon theories to mingle unmolested. On InfoWars, Steve Pieczenik, a former state department assistant secretary, and Tom Clancy co-writer turned QAnon truther, explained how the ‘voter fraud’ had been permitted by an all-seeing Trump because it was in fact an elaborate sting operation against his enemies: “We watermarked every ballot paper with blockchain technology…. We know very well where every one went. All of this was expected.” Or, to quote Q’s unofficial slogan: Trust The Plan.

But the open-ended nature of Q allows for many different plans. In Philadelphia, two men were arrested on gun law violations after turning up at a polling station apparently hoping to ‘straighten things out’. The back window of their Hummer was plastered with QAnon decals.

Trump seems comfortable playing all angles. Before the election, at the town hall interview that replaced the second debate, he was asked about QAnon, and openly winked at them: “I don’t know anything about QAnon… I know they’re very concerned with paedophilla”. A vote’s a vote, after all. Indeed, there was some heated talk before polling day of a ‘Quacus’: with an estimated 5% of Republican candidates in some way connected to QAnon, would the movement now have to be treated as simply another voting bloc — slapping on some pork barrel come budget-time for the anti-Satanism lobby?

In fact, most of those connections were tangential, and the vast majority of Q-endorsing candidates were no-hopers, who lost on election day. A few did slip through the net: Marjorie Taylor Greene won her Georgia Congressional race by default after her opponent withdrew, and Lauren Boebert is now a Congresswoman-elect in Colorado’s third district. Both have rowed back somewhat: while Greene once said she considered QAnon “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles out”,  ever since her campaign took off, she has been careful to avoid the subject.

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How corporations can delete your existence

By Gavin Haynes

National-level politics tends to homogenise. The liveliest supporters are usually found lower down the ballot paper. In the unlikely neighbourhood of Brooklyn, Mark Szuszkiewicz stands on the brink of election to the State Assembly. In one Instagram post, replete with #QAnon and #Q hashtags, Szuszkiewicz suggested that Tom Hanks became a Greek citizen after Greece declared paedophilia a disability. Hanks denies the allegation.

As with any falsifiable event in the life of a cult, from Heaven’s Gate down, there’s great danger for those who find they can’t deal with the cold slap of reality brought by new evidence. On the QAnonCasualties forum, the news this week was often grim: “I hoped I’d never have to write this… My aunt who was ultra QAnon shot herself earlier today, she left a note saying she was terrified the cabal was coming for her and her kids because of Trump’s loss.”

Yet for most, as sub-plots like the watermarked ballots show, this is a moment for reinvention, not dissolution. In October 2017, the prophecy went out that Hillary Clinton would be arrested by the end of the month and shipped to Guantanamo Bay. When that failed to happen, some suggested that Clinton had been arrested, but was wearing an ankle bracelet, others that the Hillary Clinton appearing at book signings and TV interviews was simply a clone. So QAnon’s disappointments are full of rich creative potential. Perhaps we are about to see a new dawn, not a sunset.

One of Festinger’s key criteria in his study was that, if the believer’s views are to adapt, they “must have social support”. The individual on their own, Festinger theorised, would be too weak to push back against irrefutable evidence. But if multiple people could talk their way round to a new consensual reality, reinforce it to each other, then all would be good again.

In that sense, at least, Q is like blockchain. Where blockchain is a distributed ledger of banking, with each transaction housed on a multiplicity of individual computers which all check each other’s homework  — Q is the distributed ledger of conspiracy. With tens of thousands of eyes group-sourcing the meaning of any given clue — and a natural internal market signal-boosting the most optimal — the Q hive mind may prove just as indestructible.

Reed Cooper, a smug blond boy in a Sunday school tie and blazer combo who festoons all his social media with American flags, is already a visual argument for the return of corporal punishment. But this reverse-Pied Piper is also the emissary of a more disturbing trend. Boomer radicalisation.

American Millennials always used to moan about their parents being “radicalised” by Fox News. While part of this was younger people complaining that their parents didn’t have the views of a Williamsburg dillettante, there was also a whisp of truth to it. A mono-diet of Hannity, the narrow wedge of talking points the station offers, can become velcro to which every other thought then sticks. The sadness was that the complaint was as much about parents subsiding into increasingly narrow and lonely lives — in which the fritzing hearth of TV is left to fill gaps in the home left by bereavement, retirement or illness.

But for some of that generation, the same comforting spool of “everyone’s talking about” content is now to be found in the infinite-scroll of social media. Mainly, on Facebook.

It’s long been obvious that Facebook is greying. Take the figures for UK users: in the period 2017-2018, Facebook shed some 400,000 18-24 year olds. For 25-44, the figures were flat, meaning that the only age groups still growing were 45-plus, with the over 65 cohort growing the most — up by 300,000 users. There are now more 65-plus users of Facebook than there are aged between 13 and 17.

In December 2018, Newsweek concluded that, for the first time in nearly a decade, less than half of all teenagers in the United States were visiting Facebook at least once in a month. The impact of that swing was becoming a vicious cycle: “this silver surge… had the knock-on effect of pushing younger people away from Facebook.”

The anecdotal evidence is, anecdotally, compelling. Around me, Big Blue has become something my generation log into only to check that it’s still there: a repository of ancient InterRailing friendships that increasingly feels just as mothballed. The teens are on SnapChat. The cool kids are on Instagram. Facebook is… well, it’s where your parents are.

Last year, two 20-year-olds created a Facebook page called A Group Where We All Pretend To Be Boomers. It went so viral that it now has its own Wikipedia page. There, younger generations roleplayed the cliches: confusion between the face with tears of joy emoji and the loudly crying emoji, unnecessary ellipses, repeated commas, and mid-sentence capitalisation.

There were updates that were narrowcast rather than broadcast (“say hi to Joe and the kids for me,,, love! You.”), complaints about minor travails of customer service (often using the fruity background wallpapers that have become the naff beating heart of what Facebook does), and the bizarre Boomer propensity to deploy gifs of Minions in any situation. And, of course, there was the heavy tack of Breitbart clickbait. And just behind it, the pure fake news.

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Are the conspiracy cranks a little bit right?

By Gavin Haynes

The most shared news pieces on the site are increasingly on the Right. On 20 July of this year, for instance, the top-performing Facebook link posts by US pages were:

1. Fox News
2. Fox News
3. Occupy Democrats
4. Fox News
5. Ben Shapiro
6. Ben Shapiro
7. Ben Shapiro
8. An0maly
9. Blue Lives Matter
10. Dan Bongino

The last of these, Dan Bongino, is a former Secret Service agent, and Fox News commentator, who wrote a book about a conspiracy theory: Spygate: The Attempted Sabotage of Donald J. Trump, in which he mused wildly about how the Obama administration placed a spy inside the Trump campaign team. Bongino skirts the boundaries of respectability. He doesn’t talk about it himself, but he regularly links to Q supporters.

In the tumble from stumping-for-Trump towards Q land, those marginal connections count — especially for a generation who already start with a limited immune system for the fake news virus. In 2018, the Social Media And Political Participation lab, based at New York University, concluded that while only 3 per cent of those aged 18 to 29 shared links from fake news sites, that rose to 11% of the over-65’s. And critically, the association with age was independent of either gender or ideological affiliation.

Q, with its narrative of “fighters” in an “army”, with their comradely slogan of “Where We Go One We Go All”,  affords community to the lonely, while the fact that it’s a conspiracy about everything just makes it a fantastic WordSearch puzzle. Suddenly, the news comes alive.

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How the far-Right is fighting the corona war

By Gavin Haynes

On the forum QAnon Casualties, the stories bear out the pattern:

My mom on FB in 2011: Innocently playing FarmVille.
My mom on FB 2020: Constantly scrolling through QAnon posts, memes, and videos.
This change has been unbelievable. She used to pay attention to the news only when she would flip through the local newspaper. Nowadays she posts QAnon or political stuff almost every single day.

One talks of how, amidst a failing relationship, his father started staying up late, drinking heavily and watching Q conspiracy theorists.

Since then, he has been spiraling. He gets into fights with lifelong best friends. As a young person who worked for a Democratic campaign, he would instigate fights with me on a regular basis. It’s exhausting. I don’t want to cut ties, but it’s becoming increasingly hard to talk to him and be around him.

Another describes a text that her mother sent to her father that morning, which read: 

“Trump is finally starting the declassification of many indictments! JFK Jr is coming out soon. Pence is out! Jr is to run with Trump! This will blow so many people’s minds!! This election is not about Dem vs Rep! It is about Dark to Light!!”

The subreddit held an unscientific poll: “What age is your Q casualty?” By far the highest band, with 70 votes, was “50s”.

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America is losing the information war

By Nina Jankowicz

So when, on Tuesday, Facebook announced it had removed over 1,500 Pages and Groups that supported Q, it was both a tacit admission of how deep the tendrils went inside the site, and the demoltion of a key node in the spider-gram of how Q spreads.

Those roots can be slashed back, but unfortunately, three years on from the first Q drop, this has become a Japanese knotweed of the marginal internet. Much like the Covid crisis that became its great incubator, the answer to the phenomenon may not be that we can snuff it out, so much as that we will have to learn to live alongside it.

Periodically, one of these tropes would be taken off the shelf and turned into a book, film or documentary: paranoia as entertainment, exemplified by the X-Files’ long run on TV in the 1990s. As for real connoisseurs, there was always David Icke: I could never look at the Queen in quite the same way after he revealed that she was actually a shape-shifting alien lizard whose favorite tipple was human blood.

Today’s conspiracy theories, however, are much less entertaining. Things started to change with the notion that 9/11 was an inside job. This idea attracted some high-profile popularisers who believed that Bush was a moron but nevertheless able to pull off a “false flag” operation of diabolical complexity; it is still popular with many tinfoil hat wearers to this day.

Then, around the time of the 2008 financial crisis, the “New World Order” surged in popularity as people such as Alex Jones railed against the plot to create a totalitarian, One World government. Jones, meanwhile, rose from the status of Austin-area eccentric who I used to watch on public access TV, to a globally infamous figure pumping out misinformation at an incredible rate via his Infowars site and social channels.

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By Gavin Haynes

Eventually, Jones’s mouth got him into serious trouble, so we don’t hear from him as much these days. But conspiracy theories continue to proliferate. A few weeks back, I learned that something was afoot with the US postal service that could jeopardise the election. That was after I discovered that the national coin shortage was a ploy to eliminate cash so that I could more easily be tracked by the government and/or big business. Nothing is accidental or a result of incompetence in the world of conspiracy theorists: always there is a hidden hand moving the pieces on the board.

But these are small conspiracies compared to “QAnon”, which posits that Donald Trump is civilisation’s only defence against a cabal of paedos, Satanists and baby-eating Democrats. The theory has spread rapidly. Supporters were first spotted at a Trump rally in 2018 while the movement received a (vague) shout out from Trump himself at a recent White House briefing. Spittle-flecked and barking mad it may be, but let us not forget that large parts of the UK press, an MP and the police were taken in by a fantastical paedophile conspiracy theory not so long ago. Meanwhile this straight-to-video, porno-horror, Right-wing blend of nonsense comes hot on the heels of the collapse of the much more socially acceptable “Russiagate”, the liberal-Left fantasy that Trump was some kind of double agent, taking orders from his master in the Kremlin.

Paranoiacs we shall always have among us, but in healthier epochs they are relegated to the margins. Sometimes, however, a Joseph McCarthy can destroy careers, while a Stalin or Mao can destroy lives with paranoid imaginings. Our 21st century conspiracy theories have not reached that level, but the proliferation of poisonous fantasies is surely a sign, if more signs were needed, that something has gone badly awry in our hyper-partisan, hyper-online society.

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By Travis View

Richard Evans, a respected historian of the Third Reich, is supremely contemptuous of conspiracy theories, and in his new book, The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination, he takes aim at five associated with the Führer: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion; the claim that the German army was betrayed in World War I by its own people; the belief that the Nazis started the Reichstag fire deliberately; the speculations surrounding Rudolph Hess’ flight to Scotland; and the unkillable notion that Hitler and Eva Braun escaped to Argentina to live out a cozy old age among the alpacas.

But if the title is suggestive of History Channel schlock, then the truth of the book is quite the opposite: Evans ruthlessly annihilates each conspiracy he tackles. Indeed, towards the end he demolishes the History Channel’s fatuous “Hunting Hitler” with all the vigor of an irate 1950s schoolmaster caning a blancmange into oblivion.

Yet Evans’ book does much more than make fans of dogshit cable channels disappointed. Referencing Richard Hofstader’s seminal essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, he frames his case studies in the broader historical context of conspiracy theories going back to writings about Freemasons and the Illuminati in the eighteenth century, while seeking to draw out common traits, from the core belief that only an elite few can detect the sinister forces lying behind events to the tendency towards accumulating piles of “alternative facts” which are martialed against “official histories” which (of course) only exist to serve the interests of the powers that be.

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Not that facts are actually all that important. For instance, in his analysis of The Protocols, Evans not only traces the history of this notorious forgery but highlights the fact that many people knew and accepted that it was a forgery quite early on in its existence. Hitler referenced it only glancingly in Mein Kampf to address the question of its fakeness, while Goebbels admitted to his diary “I believe that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a forgery.” Henry Ford — a great populariser of the Protocols via his book The International Jew — also admitted as much. Yet this awareness did not stop them from finding the Protocols useful, or advancing the Piers Morgan-type argument that literal truth didn’t matter if they expressed a deeper greater truth.

For Evans, however, defence of the truth is non-negotiable: he rejects “naïve scepticism that casts doubt not only on the truth of the conclusions reached by painstaking and objective historical research, but on the very idea of truth itself”. Without this, he adds, “the possibility of organising society on rational lines and on the basis of reasoned and informed decisions is thrown into question”.

For me, the most illuminating section of Evans’ book is the second chapter, which is dedicated to the “stab in the back” theory. Typically, we imagine conspiracy theories to be the preserve of weirdoes and extremists, but this was a fantasy geared towards the psychological needs of the establishment: members of Germany’s officer class, nationalists and conservative clergymen could not accept that they had lost the war through their own failures. Instead, they blamed a collapse of morale and willpower on the home front for the army’s defeat; this eventually mutated into a belief that there was an active conspiracy undermining the war effort, involving socialists, communists and pacificists.

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By Daniel Kalder

This flight by members of Germany’s wartime establishment into self-exculpatory fantasy, I think, helps us to understand the phenomenon of Russiagate — which similarly enabled large swathes of America’s political and media elites, traumatised by the defeat of their candidate at the hands of a ridiculous showbiz caricature, to retreat into a conspiratorial delusion that liberated them from the need to honestly assess their own failings. Initially, editors of major news organisations dispatched explorers to the heartlands to find out why the people had failed them so, while Clinton undertook a grand defeat tour of the country to blame others.

But this was not enough, and so it was that a bunch of unverified assertions in some oppo research developed into a conviction that Trump and his minions were consciously colluding with the diabolical Putin. This in turn developed into a multi-million dollar, three-year investigation and all-you-can-eat buffet of paranoia served up day and night by the media, and then amplified via social media…. only to turn out to have been a nothingburger of epic proportions. Conspiracy theories are not only for basement dwellers and loons: nice, respectable people who recycle and read The New York Times can get into them too.

Which brings me to my next point. Evans notes that the question “cui bono?” is “almost always” a feature of conspiracy theories: find out who benefits, and you know who is to blame. Now the metastasising of paranoid imaginings may very well represent a society losing its shit on a grand scale, but asking cui bono of the theories themselves reminds us that they are often packaged and sold to us as commercial products.

The fake moon landing myth inspired the film Capricorn One; The X-Files came with endless merchandising tie-ins and a movie; Alex Jones promotes conspiracy-as-lifestyle through his site, selling everything from survival foods to emergency radios to “ProstaGuard” prostate health pills “…because there’s a war on for your mind.” Meanwhile, non-stop Russiagate on MSNBC, CNN and in pages of The New York Times worked wonders for ratings, clicks and advertising revenue.

Thirty years ago, it took months or years and a large investment of money to make a documentary or book. Today these obstacles have disappeared: anyone anywhere can write, publish and distribute conspiracy theories. Meanwhile, the paranoid imagination — apocalyptic, extreme, divisive, pornographic, Manichaean — provides almost perfect fodder for today’s click-fuelled news business model. But what the heck: it’s all fun, games and record profits right up until society collapses and we’re all fighting giant rats for scraps of food in the smoking rubble of our ruined societies, isn’t it?

The guessing game began. Their clothes didn’t scream Socialist Worker Party. So what were they protesting? Who were these children, and what did they need saving from? The Bedroom Tax? Black Lives Not Mattering? Turkey Twizzlers?

As we crowded into Trafalgar Square the answer became obvious: satanic paedophile cults.

There, a crowd of true believers were gathering for the grand jamboree of dissent that was the Unite For Freedom Rally. I had accidentally stumbled into the conspiracy theory motherlode. There were many more QAnon posters — the particular creed that these two were devoted to. But there were also posters that advertised Bill Gates’s largely unrelated attempts to depopulate the West. Then the vaguely related but far more established anti-vaxxers. Then the ultra-modern 5G types. A man in a cut-out face visor held a garish folk art poster with more orthodox anti-Semitic Rothschild tropes, even as more milquetoast libertarians used their posters to assert only that “masks are muzzles” and “new normal = new fascism”. Finally, there was a single placard, perhaps designed to unite these disparate sub-tribes under a single belief system. It said only: “SCAM”.

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By Tom Chivers

The Unite For Freedom Rally had been advertised online as aiming for ‘an end to Government lies and the restoration of all freedoms’, but its remit went far wider than that, because its organiser was Kate Shemirani.

In recent weeks, Shemirani has emerged as the leader of Britain’s anti-Covid conspiracists. The quickest way into her belief system is to note that she refused chemotherapy for breast cancer on the advice of a husband who thought 9/11 was an inside job, then embarked on: “a fat-free, salt-free, sugar-free vegan regime including high doses of vitamins as well as 13 juices a day, five coffee enemas and mistletoe injected into her stomach”. Anti-vax is her strong suit, but you name it and Shemirani will believe it.

So why was she teaming up with Dolores Cahill? Cahill is a doctor and a professor from University College Dublin. She’s a world expert in biomarker discovery and diagnostics; you can’t say that about people who squirt mistletoe into their tummies.

Cahill was one of the early speakers. She believes we’ve over-egged the lethality of coronavirus (perfectly reasonable), and also that vaccines carry safety risks (debatable, but she has the scientific chops to make a case). Just upstream of her, the day’s first speaker quoted nothing more noxious than Karol Sikora and Carl Heneghan, putting a mainstream case that anyone locked down with Toby Young would know only too well.

Yet just 20 minutes later David Icke was onstage, joining all imaginable dots as he hammered his emetic catchphrase: “People of England get off your knees, the lion sleeps no more.”

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How the far-Right is fighting the corona war

By Gavin Haynes

Many conspiracy theories are already negations of other conspiracy theories. Is it a necessary or merely a sufficient condition to believe that Bill Gates is trying to depopulate the Western world, in order to believe that a New Jersey pizza parlour is a global hub for the dial-out molestation of children?

If Dolores Cahill believes that vaccines containing aluminium risk long-term toxicity if injected intra-muscularly, how does this square with Shemirani’s view: that they are full of microchips bearing ‘Darpa thought-monitoring agents’? Curiously, no one seemed interested in debating anyone else’s view. The crowd cheered everything.

‘Sharing a platform’ is a peculiar modern fallacy — a kind of lo-res conspiracy theory in itself about how ‘wings’ in politics work. But there’s also something quite strange about the bland pax that prevails here. In the world of deep belief, it seems all are welcome, more belief is always better, and nothing is ever contradictory so long as it pushes against power. It’s like one of those pan-faith conferences beloved of CofE bishops and Prince Charles. I do Buddha. You do Allah. They do Yoga. But — hey man — we all worship the same spiritual dimension.

Are conspiracy theories on the Left or on the Right of politics? Only their targets give it away. Inside the horseshoe, a hatred of the shadowy ‘Elites’ invokes both a libertarian desire to live freely and a leftist desire to topple power hierarchies. The sleight of hand that resolves the paradox is that no one is ever required to define what comes after the Elites are toppled.

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By Timandra Harkness

One reason for the present boom times for the likes of Shemirani is an age-old one: in times of trial we turn to faith. Another is more specific: the spectrum between conspiracy and truth is as blurred as it’s ever been.

The present moment seems designed to test the premise that Michel Foucault and R.D. Laing tried to write into our culture: that madness itself is a social construct, and a rational response to an insane society. Glaring contradictions in plain view are a force multiplier to the paranoid. In normal times, those contradictions are hidden by the sheer imposing gloss of an advanced society.

Yet anyone who has participated in the past few weeks of British life will be able to stick at least one finger in the gap between appearance and reality. Is it terribly surprising that some will also give it a wiggle?

Every day we are being asked to participate in what amounts to hygiene theatre. Never mind the rule of six, witness the contradiction between wearing masks in the queue for your coffee, and not when sat down right next to the queue. Witness the perspex shield between you and the barista. Then watch agog as the same server calmly places a receipt into your hand. It only takes a few seconds of googling to learn that a covid particle is 0.125 microns across, while a high-end N95 mask protects only against particles 3 microns or bigger. The size difference between a football and a goal.

Those who study conspiracy theories point out that they are seldom based on nothing. Normally, a kernel of jarring truth is exagerrated, kneaded, worked on. In the world of QAnon, that process of growing the dough even has a name: ‘baking’.

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The danger of safetyism

By Matthew Crawford

It’s not much of a conspiracy to say that day-to-day, we are often asked to practise folk epidemiology to avoid frightening the horses. My mask doesn’t so much protect you as it protects some semi-imagined other who would be too scared to go onto a packed tube carriage without an implement that only months ago the WHO said didn’t work.

So where exactly is line between frightened horses and the ‘scared sheeple’ prominent on so many Unite For Freedom posters? The paranoid already see life as one big psyops game. In the Covid age, government sees it as one big Nudge Unit. Is that much of a difference?

Some of the sheer arbitrariness involved in Covid rules is unavoidable. Other bits are merely the voice of a government that has learned to speak in an infantilising tone. But both implicitly force the mainstream to cede ground to the nutters, to reveal that they may have some small, limited point. Around that tiny reef of truth, the barnacles of Q and Anti-Vax and Gates and 5G are attaching themselves.

After the Iraq War, the fallout from Alastair Campbell’s 45 minute dossier disintegrated our belief in what ‘they’ were telling us as foreign policy. Covid is rapidly turning into a home front version. The bourgeois conspiracy Iraq unleashed: “It’s all about oil”, is not too far from the Covid libertarian one: “It’s all about control.” Both feed more feral versions: “It’s all about Israel,” and “It’s all about mind control.”

This week, the Australian state of Victoria witnessed yet another extraordinary act of police overreach: footage of cops stomping on a mentally ill man’s head, after running him down in their car, for what seems to be little more than the crime of breaking curfew.

Rather than shrink in shame, the state’s premier, Dan Andrews, used his news conference to justify their actions with a shrug. “Much of this, sorry, all of it can be avoided,” he told the press, “if people don’t protest.” What paranoia is unjustified in the face of Andrews’ statement? What part of V For Vendetta is still science fiction? Who’s the real nutter here?

Between Il Duce Dan in the real world, and the vile fantasies of QAnon online: that’s the narrow ledge of sanity on which we must all perch.

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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.