Red Pill, Blue Pill (David Neiwert)
Red Pill, Blue Pill (David Neiwert)
Red Pill, Blue Pill (David Neiwert)
DAVID NEIWERT
Guilford, Connecticut
An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Blvd., Ste. 200
Lanham, MD 20706
www.rowman.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or
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Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
Prologue
Notes
PROLOGUE
________
Lane Davis’s favorite song in high school, according to his senior yearbook,
was “Loser.” It seems fitting. The rest of his inscription featured offbeat
aphorisms—“In the time of monkeys I was a chimpanzee” (a line from the
Beck song), “Getting needles stuck through me and steel implanted,”
“Anywhere in life, make the best outta the situation. Keep it real while
maintaining the front”—suggesting alienation and someone ill at social
ease.
Blond with soft, heavy features, Davis looked large in these photos but
really wasn’t. He wasn’t athletic, didn’t play football like a lot of guys in
rural Skagit County, Washington, where he grew up. Thumbing through the
2002 Burlington-Edison High Tinas Coma, you can spot him here and there
but mostly lurking on the fringes—in the debate team room, posing with a
Speedy Gonzales figure, looking skeptical and painfully hip in his senior
photo.
He and his family—mom, dad, brother, and sister—lived out in the
sticks, on Samish Island, which actually ceased being an island sometime in
the early twentieth century when local landowners built a system of dikes
that created a permanent causeway between the island and the mainland, so
people drive on and off it across the main road at any time. But it is part of
a cultural landscape populated with island communities, ferries, boats, and
wildlife. Getting to high school each day entailed a thirty-minute drive
across delta farmland.
Lane’s dad, Charles “Chuck” Davis, was an attorney known around the
community as “Mr. Samish Island.” He organized all kinds of community
activities, including sailing activities that taught young people how to
handle a boat. He and his wife, Catherine, were pillars of the community,
and their home was centrally located on a curve overlooking Samish Bay.3
Their daughter Allison and son Peter were both considered bright, outgoing,
pleasant young people. Their son Lane, not so much. He was, as polite
Northwesterners put it, “difficult.” Surly. Harsh. Highly intelligent and
contemptuous of others around him.
When Lane graduated, he enrolled at the university on the other side of
the state, Washington State, in the rolling Palouse farmland and began
studying physics.4 He washed out after only a year or so, though. After that
he wandered quite a bit, career-wise. He worked in the software world
around the Seattle/Redmond area for a few years, but nothing ever stuck. In
2009, though, he began finding his future: online.
That was the year Lane first popped up on YouTube under the nom de
plume Seattle4Truth.5 His first few videos were dabblings in health-related
conspiracy theories, as well as Davis’s theories about physics, which he
eventually published on a dubious-science website called The General
Science Journal. Titled “Quantum Cold-Case Mysteries Revisited,” it was a
series of ruminations on quantum physics that were, in fact, regurgitated
and utterly discredited theories about perpetual motion. For most of the first
year or so online, Lane’s video output was along similar niche crackpot
lines.
But then he began spreading out, creating videos that became
increasingly imbued in far-right conspiracism. One video claimed the
Oklahoma City bombing was a false flag, while another “exposed” the
hoary conspiracy by the Jewish Rothschild family to control world banking
and government. The 9/11 attacks were an insider “false flag” event. People
who consume public drinking water are dosing themselves with mind-
controlling lithium. In a media market where such videos were as common
as seagulls at a fisherman’s wharf, Lane’s videos didn’t make much of a
mark.
He made his living by working at an aluminum smelter in Ferndale, an
hour’s drive from Samish Island, where he told friends he made a six-figure
salary. He had a place of his own near Bellingham during those years but
kept making videos. When he was laid off in 2014, he had to move back to
Samish Island, where he took up a wing of his parents’ home and tried
figuring out other ways to make a splash online.
He struck online gold, finally, in 2015 with an epic three-hour-twenty-
minute pastiche about the so-called Gamergate controversy, titled
“#Gamergate: Actually, It’s about . . .” Comprised mostly of clips arguing
that discussions and seminars within the computer gaming corporations and
the larger design community were part of a larger plot by “cultural
Marxists” to make video games less “masculine”—that is, less structured
around first-person-shooter architecture—as part of a larger globalist
scheme to emasculate young white males.
Not only was it a massive hit, it brought him to the attention of some of
the gods of the Gamergate world, particularly Breitbart News’ tech editor
Milo Yiannopoulos, who since 2012 had been generating an entire career as
a political provocateur out of the toxic cauldron of that online controversy.
Ostensibly a debate over the ethics of online-gaming journalism, in the
fever swamps of Internet message boards, video chat rooms, and news
comments sections, it turned mostly into an attack on feminists, especially
those in the game-design community, featuring threats and at-home
harassment and “doxxing,” in which all of your personal information—your
address, your Social Security number, everything—is published online for
everyone in the world to see. It also became a recruiting ground for white
nationalists and neo-Nazis and played an essential role in generating what
became known as the “alt-right.”
Davis’s Gamergate video came to Yiannopolous’s attention after he was
adopted by a kind of feeder blog called The Ralph Retort, which specialized
in right-wing conspiracism. Ethan Ralph, the site’s founder and editor,
began running Davis’s videos and posts along with effusive praise for his
“insanely good” research skills. He gave him the title of “senior political
analyst” and wrote that “The things he’s saying are true” and praised his
“tireless efforts” and for being “proven right again.”
Yiannopoulos snapped him up in late 2015 and added him to his
“Project Milo” team. Davis worked as a speechwriter and ghostwriter on
Milo’s autobiography, Dangerous, the winter and spring of 2016. The
problem was that Milo wasn’t paying him. He wasn’t paying anyone, for
that matter; much of his organization was actually being operated by
“volunteers” who were happy to be in his orbit and perform work for no
pay.6 At least, Milo seemed to think they were happy. Lane Davis wasn’t.
He asked Milo for a paying position in February. He got turned down. So in
March, he handed a pile of emails to a BuzzFeed reporter, Joseph Bernstein,
who turned them into a story exposing how Yiannopoulos was running a
scam operation that ripped off the people working for him.
Milo did manage to land Davis a job at the right-wing Capital Research
Center, praising him as “One of my most gifted researchers. Total
autodidact . . . hugely smart.”
Davis wrote a piece attacking the MacArthur Foundation that was
published in May 2017 under a joint Yiannopoulos-Davis byline titled
“MacArthur’s Thought Police: A Foundation Helps Twitter and Other
Social Media Enforce Left-Wing Ideology.”
By then, however, Davis had moved on. Working more feverishly than
ever for The Ralph Retort, he began pouring out videos focusing on the so-
called Pizzagate conspiracy theory, as well as a handful of associated
conspiracies. One of these turned up at Alex Jones’s Infowars website under
a Ralph Retort byline (headlined “Big Brother: Top Soros Henchman Calls
for Government-Run Social Media in Order to Stop Infowars and
Breitbart”) in May also. This meant he was rising steadily within the
conspiracy theory ecosystem.
He had become increasingly obsessed with the conspiracy theory that
there was a global pedophilia ring operating out of Washington and
Hollywood that was the underpinning of the Pizzagate claims, which were
predicated on emails stolen from Democratic National Committee (DNC)
headquarters in 2016.7 (Theorists claim that some of the emails contained
secret code words indicating that there were children being held in a
dungeon in a D.C. pizza parlor. In December 2016, one of the believers in
these theories walked into that restaurant with an AR-15 and fired some
rounds into a closet door he believed would reveal the opening to the
dungeon rather than the janitorial supplies it contained.)
Lane often veered into violent, threatening language when discussing
the supposed pedophilia ring. In a three-way video conversation with fellow
Ralph Retort participants, he became enraged when one of them opined that
same-sex restrooms were harmless. Lane accused him of hoping to spy on
young girls in public facilities.
“Pedo Marxist piece of shit!” Lane screamed. “I’ll stab your bitch ass if
I ever see you.”
Summer was getting into full swing on Samish Island, but Lane spent
most of his time on his computer, creating and posting videos, nearly all of
them variations on the Pizzagate theories, including a related theory that the
unsolved death of a DNC staff member named Seth Rich was part of the
lethal coverup of the pedophilia ring. Lane also posted a video arguing that
all progressives and liberals were participants in the global pedophilia
phenomenon.
“But what if I were to tell you that pedophilia is a basic tenet of the
progressive ideology? You think hyperbole?” he told his audience. “Let’s
look to Germany, where the modern progressive ideology based on social
sciences has its roots. In 2010, Germany’s Der Spiegel newspaper published
a three-part series on ‘The Sexual Revolution in Children.’ Part 1 was titled,
‘How the Left Took Things Too Far.’ Quote: ‘Germany’s left has its own
tales of abuse. One of the goals of the German 1968 movement was the
sexual liberation of children. For some time, this meant overcoming all
sexual inhibitions, creating a climate in which even pedophilia was
considered progressive.’ . . . They felt they were doing nothing wrong, it
was just scientific, progressive social science.”8
There was a growing contempt and anger in his voice. He was primed
and ready to explode.
Chapter 1
CONSPIRACIES AND
THEORIES
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
—Philip K. Dick, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon
Scope: their purpose is usually to achieve only one or two ends, often
narrow in nature.
Time: their actions necessarily occur within a relatively short time
frame.
Number of participants: all successful conspiracies are the product of
only a handful of people.
Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then.
—Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly
Stephen Paddock didn’t have a lot of friends. Those who knew him, though,
all agreed that he had a thing about guns and the Second Amendment and a
deep fear that the government would attempt to take them away.
They just didn’t expect him to commit, on October 1, 2017, the worst
mass shooting in American history.
Like most men of his generation—Paddock attended high school and
college in California in the 1970s—Paddock was drawn into the world of
conspiracy theories not through the Internet or social media, but from the
alternative media ecosystem that emerged in the 1990s associated with the
“Patriot” militia movement. These earlier conspiracists’ main media then
was the radio, including a variety of guerrilla broadcasts on underground
networks, as well as mailings and email exchanges as the chief forms of
communication.
Guns were the essence of the militia movement—most of its
participants had multiple weapons and considerable stockpiles of
ammunition. They showed them off to each other, and gun shows, which
attracted a significant contingent of paranoid and suspicious people, were
often where the militias themselves organized. Timothy McVeigh, the
Patriot militiaman who killed 168 people in Oklahoma City in April 1995
with a large truck bomb, made a living for years traveling to gun shows and
selling wares there. He would hand out copies of the white-supremacist
race-war tract, The Turner Diaries, to people who bought guns out of the
back of his car from him.1
It was this deep paranoia about the government confiscating their guns
—set off by Bill Clinton’s ill-fated ban on assault weapons passed in 1994
—that was the meat and potatoes of what Patriot militiamen talked about,
organized around, and prepared for. This fear in turn launched the career of
the greatest megastar of the conspiracy-theory universe, Alex Jones.2
Many of the people who were radicalized by conspiracy theories in the
1990s never lost their conviction that there was a nefarious New World
Order plot to enslave mankind. Among them was Stephen Paddock.3
When Adam Le Fevre, an Australian man who was in a relationship
with the sister of Paddock’s girlfriend, visited Paddock’s suburban Las
Vegas home in 2013, he was given a tour of the place, including the gun
room.4
“Steve said ‘bedroom . . . sitting room . . . and gun room . . .’ Aah, gun
room?” Le Fevre later told an interviewer.
The two of them got into a discussion about guns, and when Le Fevre
expressed some skepticism about the need for Second Amendment
protection of gun ownership, Paddock became emphatic.
“I raised that question with Steve and it’s something that he came back
at me with an incredible degree of vigor,” Le Fevre recalled. “He was very
strict and very firm on the fact that it’s a right. It’s the freedom of every
American to participate, to own a gun and use it . . . when need be.”
What most of his friends didn’t know about Steve Paddock was that his
father was one of the longest sought names on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted
list, having escaped prison in Texas in 1969 and remaining uncaught until
1977. Though he had little contact with his father for most of his life (the
old man died of a heart attack in 1998), they shared a set of personality
traits: both men were described as highly intelligent, arrogant, and
egotistical.5
People who knew Paddock in high school said that he was “a real brain”
and “extremely smart,” but also self-absorbed and narcissistic.6 After
getting a degree in business administration at Cal Northridge in 1977, he
went to work as a postal carrier, then at the Internal Revenue Service, where
he was an agent until 1984.
Family members later told reporters that part of his motivation for being
a federal employee involved his desire to avoid paying taxes, which he
loathed deeply: he “worked for the IRS in order to learn how to hide his
income,” his brother said.7
Multiple people, including a real estate broker with whom Paddock had
dealings, described how he hated the government and hated paying taxes to
it, even moving property ownership from California to Nevada in order to
avoid them.8 This did not change over the years: Adam Le Fevre described
to another correspondent how Paddock was “animated about the
government and the tax system” and “outspoken about the inadequacies and
waste of the government.”9
Though his behavior is consistent with a follower, it’s unclear whether
Paddock participated in the radical anti-tax movement of the 1970s and
1980s. This movement was affiliated with the conspiracist far right of the
time, and many of its tenets and participants were foundational in
establishing the Patriot militia movement of the ’90s. Although it’s likely he
was exposed to the ideology, there is no evidence Paddock joined any of the
anti-tax organizations of that period.
Telling people that he had figured out how to play gambling odds in a
way that could sustain an income, Paddock quit work in 1984 and lived off
his considerable real estate investments and gambling winnings. He began
leading a more leisurely lifestyle, taking overseas cruise ship tours, settling
into communities in Texas, California, and Florida before moving to the Las
Vegas exurb of Mesquite in 2015.
Something went wrong with his finances in September 2015, according
to Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo, who told reporters later that
Paddock—who was profiled by experts as a narcissist obsessed with being
part of the Las Vegas elite—lost “a significant amount” of money in his
investments that month.10
He also began collecting guns and became increasingly paranoid about
them. (Apparently he was also a fan of Donald Trump: “He was happy with
Trump because the stock market was doing well,” Lombardo noted.)
Between October 2016 and the same month a year later, he purchased fifty-
five weapons, most of them rifles, to complement what was already an
arsenal of twenty-nine guns. Paddock also had a girlfriend, but in mid-
September 2017, he sent her to her home country of the Philippines on a
family visit—a surprise trip he sprang on her. When she arrived, he wired
her $100,000 to buy a home there.11
At one point, he began scouting locations for what he had in mind. He
visited several hotels overlooking popular music festivals, including what
would have been the venue for the Lollapalooza rock music festival in
Chicago.12
Back in Las Vegas, however, he had apparently taken up with a
prostitute who later spoke on condition of anonymity. She told investigators
she “would spend hours drinking and gambling in Las Vegas” with a
“paranoid” and “obsessive” Paddock. “Mikaela,” as the twenty-seven-year-
old escort named herself, said Paddock would “often rant about conspiracy
theories including how 9/11 was orchestrated by the U.S. government.”13
Late in September, another witness told police she saw a man
resembling Stephen Paddock with another white male at a Vegas restaurant
three days before the shooting.14 Both of them were ranting back and forth
about the 1992 standoff at Ruby Ridge and the 1993 Waco siege, both
important martyrdom dates for Patriot militiamen (McVeigh later told
authorities the Oklahoma bombing was revenge for those two events).
These comport with a third unconfirmed witness’s tale. This man—a
former chef who was in the county lockup on a petty crime charge at the
time of the mass shooting—told police he and Paddock had met at a Bass
Pro Shop in Las Vegas two weeks before. The man offered to sell Paddock
the schematics for making an auto sear: the kind of specialized mechanism
that converts a rifle from semiautomatic to automatic, turning an AR-15
into a machine gun capable of mowing down crowds.
The chef described how Paddock would carry on about “antigovernment
stuff” that included FEMA camps and Hurricane Katrina. “He asked me if I
remembered Katrina,” he said. “That was just a dry run for law enforcement
and military to start kickin’ down doors and . . . confiscating guns,” the man
quoted Paddock as saying.15
If this account is accurate, it is probably not a coincidence that Paddock
had been stocking guns throughout the year preceding October 1, 2017. The
2016 hurricane season had been the worst on record, and the 2017 season
was anticipated to be even worse (as indeed it was).
“He was kind of fanatical about this stuff; I just figured he’s another
Internet nut, you know, watching too much of it and believing too much of
it,” said the man.
The deal fell apart, though, because Paddock wanted the man not just to
sell him the plans, but to actually make the auto sears for him. He offered
him $500. The man turned him down, saying: “I’m too old to spend the rest
of my life in federal prison.” Paddock wasn’t interested in the schematics.
He did, however, try to explain his motivations to the chef: “Somebody
has to wake up the American public and get them to arm themselves.
“Sometimes sacrifices have to be made.”16
________
Conspiracy theories are the one constant thread that runs through the
backgrounds of every right-wing American domestic terrorist of the past
half-century.
In 1984, the notorious neo-Nazi terrorist gang The Order went on a six-
month criminal rampage in which they robbed banks and armored cars by
the dozen, counterfeited money, and assassinated a radio talk-show host in
Denver before being brought to ground by the FBI. They believed that
white people were the victims of a nefarious Jewish cabal secretly running
the government and the media, calling it ZOG, the Zionist Occupation
Government.17
Timothy McVeigh believed a “New World Order” cabal was plotting to
deprive Americans of their guns and round them up into concentration
camps and that federal raids on right-wing extremists at Ruby Ridge, Idaho,
and in Waco, Texas, were proof of that. He killed 168 people with a truck
bomb outside the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995.18
Eric Rudolph believed in a similar conspiracy theory, but with a decided
religious twist in which abortion played a central role. Rudolph set off a
backpack bomb at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, then pipe-bombed
women’s health clinics and a gay bar before leading authorities on a three-
year manhunt in the North Carolina woods.19
These are only the most notorious examples. Right-wing domestic
terrorism in fact has been occurring at a steady but muted pace for most of
the past three decades, embodied by armed standoffs and police officer
shootings by so-called sovereign citizens (who believe in a convoluted but
arcane and heavily document-oriented conspiracist version of government).
Nearly all of these terrorists were recruited into their belief systems through
relatively traditional means of recruitment—namely, exposure to printed
material, underground radio broadcasts, and face-to-face interpersonal
proselytization, sometimes in the context of an organization. Rudolph was
raised within an extremist Christian Identity church. Many of the terrorists
were originally radicalized as members of the conspiracist John Birch
Society.
Anders Breivik, however, was a different breed of domestic terrorist. A
new breed. He was the first real Internet age terrorist.
Although the ideology that fueled Breivik’s violence—eliminationist
white supremacism—was what he had in common with those earlier
terrorists, Breivik was very much a child of the Internet. He was mostly
radicalized online. On the day he murdered seventy-seven people, he
published online a fifteen-hundred-page manifesto, complete with video
and multiple links, to the mostly American Islamophobes and white
nationalists whose ideas he had absorbed.
Breivik grew up in the Norwegian capital of Oslo, a child of divorced
parents who was raised by a mother who, according to one child
psychologist who treated him as a child in the 1980s, “sexualized” him and
berated him, telling him she wished he’d never been born.20 As a teenager
he dabbled in hip-hop culture and became a street graffiti artist, which got
him into trouble with the law.21 When he tried to join the Norwegian army,
he was deemed “unfit for service” during the vetting process.22
In his early twenties, he would later claim, he embarked on a long-term
plan to commit an act of terrorism.23 In 2002, at the age of twenty-three, he
founded a computer programming business that eventually earned him
several million kroner. He moved back in with his mother after suffering
financial setbacks, though he still retained a large nest egg of two million
kroner, which he used to proceed with his plan.
In 2009, Breivik bought a farm operation in rural Hedmark County that
mainly grew fresh produce of various kinds.24 He moved to the farm, which
had a small house on the acreage, in June 2011, and began buying lots of
ammonium nitrate fertilizer. Being a farmer gave him cover.
The neighbors thought there was something “off” about Breivik. One
described him as a “city dweller who wore expensive shirts and who knew
nothing about rural ways.” Still, there was nothing exceptional about him.
They didn’t know that over the past year he had been assembling a
private arsenal of weapons, including a Ruger semiautomatic rifle,
purchased legally. Breivik had traveled to Prague in 2010 in an attempt to
purchase illegal guns but backed out when it became too hazardous. He also
bought a Glock handgun.25
In the back of a large white van, he began assembling a classic
McVeigh-style truck bomb: barrels of ammonium nitrate mixed with jet
fuel, carefully stirred, and topped with detonators. It took him, he later said,
a couple of weeks.
On the morning of July 22, he packed everything into the back of the
van, then drove the ninety miles or so to Oslo. Just before he left, he hit
“Send” on his computer, publishing his video on YouTube and launching
his manifesto onto the Internet. He sent it directly via email to more than a
thousand people.
Titled 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, it rambled on
for fifteen hundred pages of evidence intended to “prove” various
conspiracy theories, all of which established the need for a new “Christian”
crusade in Europe to drive out the invading Muslims.26 It included a wealth
of autobiographical information of often dubious value, though it does
detail how he set out in 2002 with a nine-year plan, as well as how he
trained for his attack on the youth camp by playing the video games Call of
Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and World of Warcraft.
The centerpiece of Breivik’s manifesto was a conspiracy theory:
namely, that the nefarious forces of “cultural Marxism” were colluding to
destroy Western white civilization and to replace white Europeans with a
polyglot population of brown people. Citing a range of mostly American
anti-Muslim ideologues—notably Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller, both
of whom he quotes multiple times—he propounds ad nauseam about the
existential threat posed to traditional cultures by the influx of Muslim
immigrants.
“Cultural Marxism” is a standout example of how conspiracy theories
do the work of radical and often toxic political ideologies.27 The general
outline of this conspiracy, according to the progenitors of the theory, is
fairly simple: a group of Jewish academics, all Marxists with a base of
operations at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main—
known as the Frankfurt School—were responsible for concocting the ideas
behind multiculturalism and “Critical Theory,” which they saw as a means
for translating Marxist ideals into cultural values. During the 1930s, the
story goes, they moved from Frankfurt to New York and Columbia
University, and their influence became so profound that it now dominates
both academia and modern popular culture.
Indeed, as they tell it, nearly all of the modern expressions of liberal
democratic culture—feminism, the civil rights movement, the ’60s
counterculture movement, the antiwar movement, rock and roll, and the gay
rights movement—are eventually all products of the scheming of this cabal
of Jewish elites.28
In reality, although the influence of the Frankfurt School is generally
viewed by most political scientists to have had a considerable range within
academia, especially regarding Critical Theory, this school of thought was
directly in opposition to the theories promoted by “postmodernists,” who
are frequently themselves identified by right-wing ideologues as leading
examples of “cultural Marxism.”29 Nor were its members leaders of any
kind of international conspiracy to destroy Western civilization. Contrary to
the characterizations of the conspiracy theorists, most of the “cultural
Marxists” of the Frankfurt School were sharply critical of the modern
entertainment industry,30 which they saw not as a tool for their own
ideology but as a kind of modern “opiate of the masses” that was
antithetical to their values.31
Moreover, multiculturalism was not the product of Critical Theory but
has much deeper roots in the study of anthropology, dating back to the turn
of the twentieth century.32 It became ascendant as a worldview in the post–
World War II years after it became apparent (especially as the events of the
Holocaust became more widely understood) that white supremacy—the
worldview it replaced—was not only inadequate but a direct source of
wholesale evil. The people who are widely recognized as the founders of
multiculturalism—particularly such anthropologists as Franz Boas and
Margaret Mead—were not members of the Frankfurt School (though both
were affiliated with Columbia), and their work had long preceded the war.
The idea of “cultural Marxism” as a plot to destroy the West originated
with a handful of far-right thinkers in the 1990s.33 One of these was the
conservative Jewish intellectual Paul Gottfried, who claimed in later years
that he had identified with the right-wing bloc of the Frankfurt School and
had first complained about cultural Marxism as an insider.34 Gottfried (who
is also credited with having helped coin the phrase “alt-right”)35 engaged in
a debate with paleo-conservative William S. Lind, an associate of far-right
godfather Paul Weyrich and his Free Congress Foundation,36 questioning
whether or not such thinkers could be properly labeled Marxists. Lind
concluded that they could and should be (Gottfried disagreed).
In short order, Lind began developing a cottage industry around his
“cultural Marxism” theory, promoting the idea on the Internet, in speeches,
and in videos. “Cultural Marxism is a branch of western Marxism, different
from the Marxism-Leninism of the old Soviet Union,” he wrote. “It is
commonly known as ‘multiculturalism’ or, less formally, Political
Correctness. From its beginning, the promoters of cultural Marxism have
known they could be more effective if they concealed the Marxist nature of
their work, hence the use of terms such as ‘multiculturalism.’”37
Eventually, Lind propounded on the topic at a Holocaust denial
conference in 2003, where he explained to the audience pointedly: “These
guys were all Jewish.”38
Weyrich, who had already promoted the idea of “cultural conservatism,”
also heavily promoted the idea, presenting it as the subject of a speech he
gave in 1998 to the Civitas Institute’s Conservative Leadership Conference:
“Cultural Marxism is succeeding in its war against our culture. The
question becomes, if we are unable to escape the cultural disintegration that
is gripping society, then what hope can we have?”39
This became the cornerstone in Weyrich’s call for conservatives to join
in a “culture war” against liberals, joining the ranks of such
paleoconservatives as Patrick Buchanan, the former presidential candidate
who in 1992 had originally issued a call for such a “culture war” at the
Republican National Convention.40
Beginning in 2000, Buchanan picked up Lind and Weyrich’s idea and
ran with it, incorporating his attacks on “cultural Marxism” in his writings,
and began giving a number of interviews in which he laid all of the world’s
ills at its feet. In his 2001 book The Death of the West: How Dying
Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and
Civilization, Buchanan described it as a “regime to punish dissent and to
stigmatize social heresy as the Inquisition punished religious heresy. Its
trademark is intolerance.”41
The book ascribes nearly superhuman powers to Critical Theory. “Using
Critical Theory, for example, the cultural Marxist repeats and repeats the
charge that the West is guilty of genocidal crimes against every civilization
and culture it has encountered,” Buchanan averred. “Under Critical Theory,
one repeats and repeats that Western societies are history’s greatest
repositories of racism, sexism, nativism, xenophobia, homophobia, anti-
Semitism, fascism and Nazism. Under Critical Theory, the crimes of the
West flow from the character of the West, as shaped by Christianity. . . .
Under the impact of Critical Theory, many of the sixties generation, the
most privileged in history, convinced themselves that they were living in an
intolerable hell.”
In addition to Buchanan and the paleoconservatives, the theory was also
quickly adopted by white nationalists who began promoting the theory
assiduously. The most notable of these was the far-right publisher Roger
Pearson, a retired anthropologist and prominent eugenicist.42 Besides
numerous eugenicist and supremacist books and journals, he published a
book in 2006 by Frank Ellis titled Marxism, Multiculturalism, and Free
Speech that laid out the basics of the cultural Marxism theory and claims.
Ellis, a former Leeds University professor, claimed that “political
correctness” could be traced to Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong and that it
was designed as an attack on the principles of free speech.
Other white nationalists, notably Jared Taylor of American
Renaissance,43 academic Kevin MacDonald,44 and Peter Brimelow of
VDare, likewise made discussion of “cultural Marxism” central to their
arguments. Taylor railed against it and multiculturalism at a Council of
Conservative Citizens convention in 1999. MacDonald discussed “cultural
Marxism” at length in his book Culture of Critique and discusses it
frequently in interviews and in his magazine, Occidental Observer.45
Brimelow mentioned the concept as early as 2003 and, all the way through
2017, was blaming it for the world’s ills, including the cancellation of a
VDare conference.46
It also gained wide play among right-wing conspiracy theorists led by
Alex Jones, who featured guest conspiracist Alan Watt on air during a 2010
show. Watt told Jones: “People really have lost a sense of dignity and self-
respect and definitely a common culture. That was part of the deep massive
Communist move for multiculturalism. It wasn’t to be nice to other
cultures, it was to help you destroy your own cohesive majority.”47
“Get rid of all other cultures and replace it with a corporate Borg
culture,” Jones surmised.
However, the concept also began moving into the mainstream of the
conservative movement as early as 2008, mainly due to the contributions of
Andrew Breitbart, the founder of the online news organization Breitbart
News.
In his autobiography Righteous Indignation, Breitbart described his
discovery, in about 2007, of “cultural Marxism” as his “awakening.” He
told an interviewer in 2012, shortly before his death, that the concept was
like “putting the medicine in the sherbet. . . . My one great epiphany, my
one a-ha moment where I said, ‘I got it—I see what exactly happened in
this country.’”48
Breitbart began holding forth at length in various venues about the evils
of “cultural Marxism.” He appeared on Fox News and told Sean Hannity
and his audience: “For much of the latter half of the twentieth century,
America dealt with Communism, which was economic Marxism. And what
America was susceptible to during that period of time was cultural
Marxism. Cultural Marxism is political correctness, it’s multiculturalism,
and it’s a war on Judeo-Christianity.”49
After Breitbart’s death in 2012, the news organization bearing his name
continued its tradition of obsession with cultural Marxism; the subject
remains a popular keyword among the website’s writers.
And, obviously, it had gained an ardent believer in Anders Breivik.
“We are sick and tired of feeling like strangers in our own lands, of
being mugged, raped, stabbed, harassed and even killed by violent gangs of
Muslim thugs, yet being accused of ‘racism and xenophobia,’” he wrote.
“As we all know, the root of Europe’s problems is the lack of cultural
self-confidence (nationalism),” he continued. “Most people are still terrified
of nationalistic political doctrines thinking that if we ever embrace these
principles again, new ‘Hitler’s’ will suddenly pop up and initiate global
Armageddon. . . . This irrational fear of nationalistic doctrines is preventing
us from stopping our own national/cultural suicide as the Islamic
colonization is increasing annually . . . You cannot defeat Islamization or
halt/reverse the Islamic colonization of Western Europe without first
removing the political doctrines manifested through
multiculturalism/cultural Marxism.” 50
His plan for doing so, according to the manifesto, entailed other true
believers who also would participate in his “Christian Crusade.” The video
he posted on YouTube contained a plenitude of images of medieval knights
in armor along with references to the “new Crusade.” He claimed that other
members of an organization called the “Knights Templar” were ready to
spring into action with similar terrorist acts elsewhere—though none were
ever named, and in truth none ever came to light.
Breivik saw himself as a white knight out to do his duty to save “his
people.” No doubt that image was in his mind as he drove the little white
van into Oslo the morning of July 22, 2011.
________
Anders Breivik, it later emerged, had had relatively few contacts with other
white nationalist ideologues in real life, though he had exchanged emails
with a number of others, particularly in the European scene. But the largest
source of his inspiration, his manifesto made clear, was material he had
found on the Internet.
This represented a marked shift. Conspiracy theories in the decades
following the Red Scare of the 1950s, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s,
were often spread slowly through organizations ranging from the John
Birch Society to the Ku Klux Klan. People were recruited into the belief
systems usually through exposure to the group’s literature followed by face-
to-face time in organizational meetings.
Some of the radical-right conspiracism of the 1990s was bolstered by
the early stages of the Internet: white supremacist websites such as
Stormfront began creating community spaces for like-minded bigots, and of
course their main content involved a potpourri of conspiracist legends and
theories. The email forwards of the 1990s—usually spurious, anonymous
content alleging all kinds of nefarious behavior by godless liberals and their
politicians—which were shared on listservs and among friends and family
members, were especially effective in spreading conspiracy theories. And
then there were radio shows, many of them “underground” broadcasts, but
others reaching broad audiences like Alex Jones’s show out of Austin,
Texas—shows that specialized in spinning dubious tales of New World
Order conspiracies, which as time went on and Jones’s audience grew
massive, in the 2000s, were renamed globalist plots.51
However, the arrival in the 2000s of a full-on digital culture changed the
path of radicalization. Increasingly, people—young white men especially—
were drawn to conspiracy theories in part because there was a deluge of
them that began hitting the Internet in the latter part of the century’s first
decade, thanks primarily to the arrival of YouTube as a major source of
media consumption, especially for younger users. On YouTube, thanks to
algorithms that encouraged people to find “engaging” content, which often
translated into “outrageously nutty and afactual” in reality, the conspiracy
theories spread like kudzu.
Breivik was one of the first young men to emerge from the spiral of
radicalization that the Internet can uniquely weave into being, and just as he
hoped, his 2011 rampage became a model and inspiration for other young
white men who tried to follow in his footsteps. Like Breivik, the funnel into
which they were drawn was the seductive downward spiral of conspiracy
theories like “cultural Marxism” that lead vulnerable minds down the rabbit
holes of white nationalism and similarly hateful ideologies, including
outright fascism.
Many of those who followed this path of online radicalization were a
good deal younger than Breivik, who was thirty-two at the time he
embarked on his terrorism plot. The archetype that developed was in most
regards more closely embodied in two men who were both in their early
twenties at the time they exploded: Dylann Roof and Elliot Rodger.52
Roof in particular left a social media crumb trail that was at once cryptic
and clear. From his Facebook page, you could see that the twenty-one-year-
old South Carolina man liked to visit historical sites. This was not a healthy
thing: they tended to be sites from the slave-trading era, like Sullivan’s
Island, the largest slave disembarkation port in North America. He had
black friends from school—despite dropping out after ninth grade—but he
also hated black people generically.53
In his manifesto, he called black people “the group that is the biggest
problem for Americans,” but like most white nationalists, he also blamed
nefarious Jews for creating it:
Niggers are stupid and violent. At the same time they have
the capacity to be very slick. Black people view everything
through a racial lense. Thats what racial awareness is, its
viewing everything that happens through a racial lense. They
are always thinking about the fact that they are black. This is
part of the reason they get offended so easily, and think that
some thing are intended to be racist towards them, even
when a White person wouldnt be thinking about race. The
other reason is the Jewish agitation of the black race.54
Roof never joined any organizations, but in addition to spending inordinate
amounts of time playing video games, taking Suboxone, and hanging out in
Columbia with his friends, he also began hanging out on the chat boards at
the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer—where “cultural Marxism” is
conventional wisdom—as well as the old school website of the Council of
Conservative Citizens (CCC).
It was at the latter site that, inspired by the case of Trayvon Martin, the
young black Florida man who was gunned down by a white security guard,
he began reading and absorbing the spurious statistics spewed there about
black crime and particularly its effect on whites: Roof fully believed the
CCC’s assertion that 80 percent of white homicides are committed by black
people. After all, a Google search had told him so.55
A ne’er-do-well whose last job had been a brief stint as a landscaper,
Roof decided he needed to rescue the white race from extermination. That
was why, on June 17, 2015, he set out on his mission, another knight off to
save the world, like Anders Breivik:
________
Elliot Rodger, like Breivik and Roof, saw himself in a similarly heroic light,
and likewise wanted to do battle with the forces of “political correctness.”
But his enemy was different: he hated women.56
Rodger was the well-to-do son of a Hollywood producer, and in most
regards a good-looking young man. But he was deeply troubled. Smaller
and slightly frail, he had always been something of a bully magnet in school
and was known to spend his days alone: he later wrote that he “cried by
myself every day.” At Crespi Carmelite High in Los Angeles, he fell asleep
at a desk one day, and other students taped his head to it.
He expressed himself at Elliot Rodger’s Official Blog and on YouTube,
where he mostly posted angst-ridden expressions of rejection and
loneliness. At home, he received mental-health counseling and drug
treatment by psychiatrists, although he never received a formal diagnosis of
a mental illness.
Rodger also spent inordinate amounts of time online in chat rooms. The
places he liked to dwell the most were some of the darkest corners of the
Internet—in particular, among his fellow dwellers in the online “incel”
culture.
“Incel” is short for “involuntary celibate,” and the young men who
participate in this universe invariably loathe women and feminists and
blame them for the men’s lack of receiving enough sex. Their solution: an
“incel revolution” in which men take back the reins of society from women
and put them back in their place with force. The revolution they envision is,
of course, quite violent.57
After all, the problem in most respects is simple: these are men who for
various reasons have difficulty sustaining a relationship long enough to
have sex (often because they don’t understand that, unlike in the world of
pornography, most women are uninterested in sex with relative strangers).
Put crudely, they can’t get laid and blame women for that. In their view, it’s
owed them.
As incels imagine things, the world is mostly comprised of “Chads”—
sexually competitive males, guys who are chosen for their superiority—and
“Stacys,” the sexually attractive and available women who get to do the
choosing and who always choose Chads. Incels see themselves as noble-
spirited rebels who stand outside that world.
Elliot Rodger was one of these young men. Posting at the misogynist
site PUAHate (“The Forefront of the Anti-Pickup Artist Movement”: this
sector of the misogynist world had repudiated sex altogether), Rodger
mused on both feminism (“If we can’t solve our problems we must destroy
our problems”) and race:
Rodger’s mother was Chinese, but he saw himself as mostly passing for
white. When an Asian male posted a query about whether a specific pair of
shoes would help him “attract white women,” Rodger responded: “White
girls are disgusted by you, silly little Asian.”
The Asian man replied by posting photos of himself with a white
woman, which set Rodger off: “Full Asian men are disgustingly ugly and
white girls would never go for you. You’re just butthurt that you were born
as an asian piece of shit, so you lash out by linking these fake pictures. You
even admit that you wish you were half white. You’ll never be half-white
and you’ll never fulfill your dream of marrying a white woman. I suggest
you jump off a bridge.”
Like many others in incel culture, he became a seething cauldron of
frustration and anger toward women and feminists, though he often
expressed vitriolic anger toward other men for outcompeting him. At other
times he struck a genteel pose, naming himself “the supreme gentleman”
and “the perfect guy.”
Because the world failed to recognize him, though, he wanted to burn it
all down. At PUAHate, he posted:
One day incels will realize their true strength and numbers,
and will overthrow this oppressive feminist system.
Start envisioning a world where WOMEN FEAR YOU.59
Rodger drove a nice a car, a black BMW. On the evening of May 23,
2014, he walked out of his apartment near the University of California,
Santa Barbara, campus, got into it, and drove away, leaving three dead
roommates behind. He drove to a Starbucks, got some coffee, and sat in the
car, uploading material to the Internet from his laptop.
Specifically, it was a manifesto, titled “My Twisted World: The Story of
Elliot Rodger,” with a meandering explanation for the violence he was
about to commit. He also uploaded a video to YouTube. It was titled
“Retribution.”60
“On the day of retribution,” he told the world, “I am going to enter the
hottest sorority house of UCSB and I will slaughter every single spoiled,
stuck up, blonde slut I see inside there.”
________
Alek Minassian always had issues, even before becoming enmeshed in incel
culture. In high school in Toronto, he was placed in a special needs
program, where he was known for making cat sounds and hugging himself.
Sometimes he tried to bite people, though otherwise was quite “harmless.”61
In college, he studied software development and had an easier time
fitting in as an adult, especially as he was able to cocoon himself in the
more insular world of research technology. And that, seemingly, was when
he was drawn into the world of incels.62
Minassian apparently fell into the culture while visiting the Internet
message board 4chan, a popular website with massive traffic numbers built
around an anything-goes approach to subject matter, including the open
expression and promotion of white nationalist and other far-right beliefs.
The problem is that Minassian never could be identified with any
previous comments or participation on incel threads, either at 4chan or
Reddit (another popular incel gathering site) or websites specifically
dedicated to the culture. Where and how he picked up the ideology is
anyone’s guess.63
In late 2017, he joined the Canadian military but washed out after two
months and sought a voluntary release. Minassian “wasn’t adapting to
military life, including in matters of dress, deportment and group
interactions in a military setting,” a senior military official commented,
noting that “there were no red flags” suggesting concerns about violence.64
The only thing anyone really knows about him is that on April 23, 2018,
he rented a large white Chevrolet Express van from a Ryder agency and
drove it into the heart of downtown Toronto, into the trendy North York
City Centre shopping district on Yonge Street. He apparently parked it long
enough to post a message onto Facebook.
Private (Recruit) Minassian Infantry 00010, wishing to speak
to Sgt 4chan please. C23249161. The Incel Rebellion has
already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys!
All hail Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!
________
Jeremy Christian had issues, too. But like Anders Breivik and Elliot
Rodger, he never received an official diagnosis of mental illness. He was
just, in the vernacular, “troubled.”65
Mostly he was in trouble with the law as a young man. When he was a
fifteen-year-old heavy-metal fan and skateboarder, he was caught breaking
into a Goodwill clothing donation box in downtown Portland, Oregon. The
police released him to his parents and there were no legal penalties. The
next year he dropped out of high school and got a job in a pizza parlor,
where he worked for the next four years, picking up a GED along the way.
He also picked up classes at Portland Community College.
Christian argued with his parents a lot. So, at eighteen, he moved out of
the family home and rented a room from the mother of a friend while
continuing to work at Pietro’s. Then, in 2002, at the age of twenty, it all
went to hell when he decided to rob a convenience store.66
The attempt went sideways from the start, though Christian wore a ski
mask. He threatened the clerk with a .38 revolver, then handcuffed him to a
cigarette rack. Christian made his getaway with $1,000 and armfuls of
cigarette cartons on a bike, and police caught him just a few blocks away,
the ski mask sticking out of a pocket. He pulled out a gun, and the officer
fired at him three times; one of the shots hit him in the right cheek. When
they had him on the ground, he told the cops he wasn’t aiming at them. He
had intended to shoot himself.67
Christian had no criminal record, but he wound up spending the next
seven years in prison, in part because the charges included kidnapping for
handcuffing the clerk.
When he got out in 2010, he apparently fell into the everyday life of
being a homeless street itinerant in downtown Portland. He was known to
trade comics outside Powell’s, the big local bookstore. He was also known
for being loud and a little frightening.68
On his Facebook page, Christian began posting a variety of conspiracy
theories. His politics swung wildly; he originally favored Bernie Sanders’s
2016 candidacy for the presidency, but after the primaries, he swung to
Donald Trump (for a while, at least) because his loathing for Hillary
Clinton was deep, visceral, and violent. After the election, he ranted:
“Death to Hillary Rodham Clinton and all her supporters!!! To be carried
out by Bernie Supporters who didn’t turn traitor and vote Hillary.”69
As spring 2017 wore on, his posts became more openly violent, deeply
Islamophobic and racist, not to mention voicing a weird obsession with
circumcision, which he connected to a nefarious Jewish conspiracy.
“I want a job in Norway cutting off the heads of people that Circumcize
Babies. . . . Like if you agree!!!” he wrote.
“If you support the cutting of babies genitals in sick tribal rituals in
America get off my page,” went another post. “I don’t care if you are friend
of family.”
A law banning circumcision, he proposed another time, would “stop
True Patriots from having to kill otherwise good doctors inside hospitals.”
“F-- You if you say my body my choice but support circumcision,” he
declared.
Street artist Raymond Alexander, a sixty-eight-year-old black man, had
known Christian for years from the streets. He told Oregonian reporter
Allan Brettman that Christian had talked race with him, but “he didn’t ever
use the master race issue on me.”70
“He went way back to Norway,” Alexander said, “to some secret society
that if they find out about this document that’s never been exposed to the
world then there’s going to be mass chaos throughout the world. . . . [H]e
was tied up in mythology, tied up in Viking blood lines.”
That spring in the Portland area, a group of right-wing extremists who
first organized as a kind of biker militia in nearby Vancouver, Washington,
renamed themselves Patriot Prayer and began organizing pro-Trump street
protests in Portland as a way of asserting their “free speech” rights—usually
in the face of a militant far left/anarchist/black bloc contingent native to the
city. Jeremy Christian was drawn to the conflict like a fly to garbage.
He showed up at one of Patriot Prayer’s first events in Portland on April
29, a kind of street march in which about thirty people carrying American
and Gadsden flags—in addition to the large Trump banner carried by Patriot
Prayer leader Joey Gibson—traveled along a busy thoroughfare in the city’s
southeastern quadrant. A contingent of antifascists accompanied and
taunted them, though no violence broke out.71
But Jeremy Christian got kicked out.
For most of the march he blended in with the other “Patriots”—a large
American flag with the stars replaced by a “1776” logo draped over his
back like a cape, a gray woolen ballcap reading “Wolverines” turned
backward, shouting “Free speech! Free speech!” When they pulled up at a
parking lot, though, Christian started getting into it verbally with some of
the antifascists. He began yelling at one of them: “White nigger! You’re a
white nigger! You are a white nigger!”72
At that point, another “Patriot” intervened. “Hey, no language! No
language!” He told Christian using the “N word” was “not appropriate”:
“Don’t do that!” Christian later told others in the parking that being called a
“Nazi” was “a joke! I’m a nihilist!” he shouted. Then, he started using a
Nazi salute.
An antifascist counterprotester dressed in a clown hat, juggling balls
and telling jokes, approached Christian and joked with him briefly. His
name was Micah David-Cole Fletcher, a twenty-one-year-old Portland State
student, and they would meet again, fatefully, a few weeks later.73
Finally, a larger group of “Patriots” stepped up and told Christian he
was being ejected from the march. He started talking gibberish to them, and
they stopped him: “No! No! You’re giving the Nazi sign, you’re using the N
word! So please go away! I won’t ask you again nicely.”
Christian turned around and shouted to the gathered crowd. “I’m the
only motherfucking free speecher here! Who will defend free speech?”
Police then escorted Christian away from the scene.
Nearly a month later, on a late evening Portland MAX commuter train,
Christian boarded and promptly announced that he was a Nazi and was
looking to recruit others to join him. He shouted that he hated Jews,
Mexicans, Japanese, and anyone who wasn’t Christian.74
A black woman named Demetria Hester—the only person of color on
the train—spoke up and told Christian he needed to keep it down.
“Fuck you Bitch!” he screamed at her, adding that she had neither the
right to speak nor to be on the train.
“I built this country!” he shouted. “You don’t have a right to speak.
You’re black. You don’t have a right to be here. All you Muslims, blacks,
Jews, I will kill all of you.”
As the train pulled into Demetria Hester’s stop, she stood up to leave.
Christian made clear he intended to get off and began shouting loudly at
everyone on the train that he didn’t care if anyone wanted to call the police
because he wasn’t scared.
“I will kill anyone who stands in my way because I have a right to do
this,” he told them. He looked at Hester and seethed: “Bitch, you’re about
to get it now.”
As she stepped off the train, Christian lunged at her with a Gatorade
bottle and smacked her above the right eye with it just as she whipped out
her can of mace and gave him a faceful. It knocked him down on the
platform. She staggered away and awaited police, who finally arrived about
twenty minutes later. Hester said the officers treated her as a likely suspect,
even though witnesses pointed out Jeremy Christian—still washing pepper
spray out of his eyes—standing feet away.
Christian wound up walking away from the scene and going home for
the night. Police later blamed this on confusion regarding who the
perpetrator was.75
The next day, he boarded another MAX train during rush hour. This
time he had a knife.
________
Buckey Wolfe and his brother James were raised in the same home in
Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood and attended the same local schools, but
they ended up on very different paths. After they graduated high school,
James joined the army and served overseas. Buckey joined the Washington
State Militia and became devoted to conspiracy theories.76
Everyone kind of knew that Buckey had mental-illness problems,
though. He had a jittery, paranoid personality and was on edge a lot.
Eventually, in his early twenties, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and
prescribed medication to cope with it.77
At the same time, he dove headfirst into the far right’s rabbit holes. In
addition to joining a militia group, he also participated in the events and
drinking games with a local chapter of the Proud Boys—the far-right, pro-
Trump, street-brawling organization that had been involved in a number of
ugly riots along the West Coast in 2017 and 2018.
Wolfe also started watching conspiracy videos on YouTube. Initially, his
video “likes” were a typical teenage boy’s interests—lots of rock videos
plus some fitness and personal motivation material. As he grew older,
though, he was drawn into politics. Initially this came through “alt-lite”
YouTubers, like Hunter Avallone, who specialize in making fun of “social
justice warriors.” Then he started liking weird science conspiracy theories
about “free energy” and “Tesla’s UFO,” before he eventually became a full-
time Alex Jones/Infowars fan. He later told friends that he had “watched
every episode” of Jones on his massive YouTube channel.78
After that, all of Wolfe’s video likes revolved around the far right,
especially Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes and his cohorts, as well as
Milo Yiannopoulos, Steven Crowder, and “Sargon of Akkad,” all figures in
the so-called alt-lite. Unsurprisingly, he then began liking videos from
openly white nationalist sites such as Red Ice.
“I’m a proud Western chauvinist and I refuse to apologize for creating
the modern world,” a Facebook post read, closing with the Proud Boys’
slogan: “Uhuru!!!”
A Facebook post from a Proud Boys member in March 2018 showing
the twenty or so members of the Seattle chapter standing outside a local
light-rail station making the mock-white-nationalist “OK” sign and holding
up a “Trump 45” shirt featured a comment from Buckey Wolfe, who
appears in it: “My face [is] covered by hands lol. Last night was awesome I
had a great time!”
Finally, Wolfe reached the apotheosis of this journey when he became
an ardent supporter of the “QAnon” conspiracy theories—a sort of meta-
conspiracy theory involving Donald Trump, Robert Mueller, Hillary
Clinton, and the same global pedophilia ring featured in Pizzagate. “It’s
coming, and it’s gonna be good!” Wolfe commented on YouTube. “Y’alls
are gonna get your just dues. I will be so happy, you have no idea.”79
While circulating in that world, Buckey also became enamored of David
Icke’s theory positing that world leaders are in fact a species of lizard aliens
from outer space who are able to disguise themselves.
In November 2018, he posted a rant: “If I start talking about the
iluminati and you role your eyes at me you have been successfully
indoctrinated. The ilimunati is VERY real, the CIA agrees with my
asurtion, this is straight from the CIAs website!!! I erge you DO YOUR
RESEARCH BEFORE YOU BLOW ME OFF!!!”
Two of his fellow Proud Boys chimed in to support him. One replied: “I
didnt believe in Zionist till I watched a rabi speak about rothchilds being
their Zionist leaders.”80
Wolfe’s family became concerned, especially after a long late December
2018 rant that he posted on Facebook about humans being replaced by alien
lizards that ended with a plea not to ignore him. His brother James chimed
in to try to calm him down. An aunt who lived in Ohio asked him if he was
okay but said that she couldn’t understand what he was talking about. This
aunt, who had lost a son the year before, added that she loved him.81
Buckey replied: “I know you don’t cus you’ve been taken, don’t think I
didn’t notice when you got back from your cruise your eyes had changed!!!!
You will be made in to dust lizard!!!!!”
________
To Antifa/Marxists/Communists
I do not want to convert you, I do not want to come to an
understanding. Egalitarians and those that believe in
heirachy will never come to terms. I don’t want you by my
side or I don’t want share power.
I want you in my sights. I want your neck under my boot.
SEE YOU ON THE STREETS YOU ANTI-WHITE
SCUM
SACRIFICES
There are always those little “sacrifices” that “have to be made” when it
comes to the conspiracist mindset of mass killers. Little people. Ordinary
people. People you and I and everyone else knows, somewhere, who
become their victims.
The killers don’t know these people. To them they are “sheeple,”
hapless pawns in the vast conspiracy ruling the world. They might as well
be conspirators themselves. Maybe some of them are.
Something like that was what Stephen Paddock, whose contempt for the
“sheeple” was remarked by several people who knew him, was thinking the
night of October 1, 2017, as he surveyed the crowd that gathered for the
huge, week-long country music festival taking place next to the Sunset
Strip, right below the suite of rooms he had rented three days before in the
Mandalay Bay hotel.1
It was quite a view. In fact, he could take it in from two entirely
different angles from the two adjoining rooms.
________
At first, Jenna thought someone had tossed out some firecrackers in the
middle of the Jason Aldean performance. An obnoxious drunken guy who
had been annoying the hell out of her suddenly dropped to the ground. She
thought he had just passed out. He hadn’t.2
Then there were more pops, and she could see people falling in front of
her, one after another.
“I don’t know how long it was, but I didn’t put the two together,” she
recalls now. “To me they were separate situations. Someone threw
firecrackers, which was annoying, and then the drunken man fell. And no
one was screaming. I would say people were kind of looking around, but
Jason Aldean did not stop singing.
“And then there was the second part when he shot again, and many
more people fell. You could see the crowd and they looked like little
dominoes going down.
“That’s where Jason Aldean stopped singing.”
Jenna and her childhood friend Sammi were not first timers at the Route
91 Harvest country music festival in Las Vegas that October 1. They had
attended the same three-night event two years before. In between, Jenna had
given birth to a little blond-haired baby girl, a bright-eyed chip off her
mama’s block, who was now ten months old, and in the care of her
grandmother back home in Tacoma, Washington.
Like Jenna, Sammi had graduated college and moved on to the working
world, too. The week in Vegas had been a chance to taste their old lives
again, maybe one last time. So Jenna left the baby, Camden, with her own
mother, and flew off for an autumn music fling.
“Sam Hunt was who I really wanted to see, and then Eric Church,” she
recalls. “So we had already seen them the previous nights. So Sunday night
we were only there to see Jason Aldean.”
Before the show, they hit a couple of casinos. Sammi’s gambling luck
changed everything and may have saved their lives. “We first went to the
Luxor where there’s this fish game that she just loves,” Jenna recalls. It was
just across Sunset Boulevard from the concert venue.
“She said she just wanted to put $10 in and then we can go over there,
because every night we had gotten up right close to the stage—not that we
could touch him, but maybe four rows back. And $10 turned into $100, and
we were there for over an hour.
“So we showed up probably fifteen minutes before he started, and that’s
why we ended up kind of farther back,” she says.
Now, people were falling in front of her, some not far away, and the
popping sounds kept coming. “I just kind of looked at Sammi and I was
like, that’s a fucking gun,” she remembers. “Someone’s shooting people.
And it finally occurred to me what we heard thirty seconds prior was a gun,
too, so this is someone shooting, twice now. And I knew it was not like a
pistol. I knew that it was something automatic and big.
“People around us had hit the ground. At that point, everyone kind of
went down. Some people just ducked. Other people had fallen or gotten hit.
“I just went down. Because that’s your human instinct, I guess, to get
closer to the ground.”
Her lifelong friend then probably saved her life again: Sammi made her
get up and flee. “She said, ‘We need to run.’ And I said, ‘I don’t think we
should run.’ And she said, ‘We have to fucking run.’ And I was super
scared. I didn’t want to run because at that point, it seemed like the shooter
was among us, so I didn’t want to run into him. I couldn’t tell—which way
is he coming from?
“People all over are falling, so I don’t know if he’s over by us. Someone
got shot right by us. But then I could see people screaming on the other side
of the stage, so I had no idea where the gunfire was coming from.
“So I said, ‘I don’t think we should run.’ And she said, ‘We will fucking
die here.’ And I said, ‘Okay.’” Jenna got up and they took off away from
the stage, toward the back of the venue.
“Basically the only reason I ran is that she started to. I was like, ‘Well, I
don’t want to die alone, I guess.’”
Ironically, it was mere moments after the two of them start running
away that they were separated. They had played soccer as teammates since
grade school and into high school, and both were good athletes, though
Jenna was known as the slower of the two. Running with the crowd away
from the gunfire to the right and past the concessions, Jenna sprinted
through the pack. “I just booked it a little bit faster I guess,” she says.
A woman who had been running alongside her suddenly took a shot
through the neck in front of Jenna. She “whipped around and went down,”
as though someone had cut the strings on a marionette.
“It was literally like it just went through and whipped her whole body
around and she went down. And I was just thinking, ‘I just have to keep
running, just have to keep running.’”
She ran outside the venue over a cyclone fence that had been toppled by
panicked concertgoers as they fled. Out on the street, however, she
instinctively took cover behind a five-foot-high transformer that shielded
her momentarily. She pulled out her cell phone and called her mother back
in Tacoma, who promptly picked up.
“After I saw that girl fall, I was like, I’m probably not going to survive
this,” she says. “I don’t even know where I’m running to. So I called her
when I was definitely behind the transformer. And I said, ‘I need you to
take care of Camden. I need you to let her know that I love her.’ And she
was kind of confused: ‘Well, where is the shooter? Or, where’s Sammi?
What’s going on?’
“And I said, “I can’t explain everything but I need you to know this.
And I don’t think I’m going to . . . I don’t know where to go. But I don’t
know if I’ll make it.’ Because at that point I’d seen . . . I mean, there were
just dead bodies everywhere, some of them just when I was running past—I
don’t know if they were dead or just lying there.
“And so it was in mind—I still have a ways to run, to where I don’t
know, or if I’m going to get hit here, but I need to at least get this out of the
way. For me, I just had a real urgency—like any parent, I’m sure—there
was a sense of urgency to tell my mom to take care of Camden. In
hindsight, it’s like, of course she would have. But it was the most important
thing, just to get confirmation that she will take care of her and that she’ll
raise her to know that I loved her.
“And for me, once that was done, I was able to start thinking a little
more clearly. OK, now let’s see if we can survive this.”
Across the street from the transformer was the local Hooters franchise,
and she dashed over to it and inside. That’s when it hit her that Sammi was
not with her and nowhere in sight. So she called her mother again, and told
her she didn’t know where her friend was. But her mother calmly reassured
her: “No, we’ve heard from Sammi.”
“Tell her to come to Hooters, it’s the closest place,” Jenna answered.
Jenna wandered through the first-floor casino at the restaurant, which
was a vacant madhouse of toppled machines and tables. Finally, she found
refuge in a walk-in cooler in the kitchen. What she did not know was that
by this point she was herself drenched in blood from the head down, none
of it her own.
“So I ran because they were holding the kitchen door open as an access
door, and I ran in and they were kind of shuffling people into the freezer.
And the woman next to me was holding a woman next to her who had a cut
or had been shot. And that was kind of shooting blood, too.” A woman
there asked Jenna where she had been hit; she answered, “I don’t think I’ve
been hit.”
The scene was fraught with the lethal unknown and all the wild
misinformation that accompanies it: Death had descended on all of them
from some place they could not see and they had run, but none of them
believed there was only one gunman. The shots rattled around the plaza and
they came from different angles, and Jenna thought it seemed as though a
team of terrorists was shooting at the crowd. Her perception was widely
shared.
Once inside the restaurant and locked down in the walk-in cooler, the
panic began to set in. Misinformation was running rampant—people inside
the cooler believed there was an active shooter inside the hotel. “Every time
someone came into the kitchen, they thought it might be the shooter and
there was a big commotion,” Jenna recalls. “And that’s when I kind of had a
moment where I could think: ‘OK, if the shooter does come in, we’re all
sitting here like a little bunch of ducks. This isn’t a good hiding spot.’
“So I announced, ‘I’m leaving.’ And I remember, the lady next to me
was kind of motherly. She was, ‘No, you can’t leave, you can’t go out
there.’ And I was, ‘I can’t stay here.’” Jenna left and returned to the vacant
casino floor, trying to find a hiding place.
It turned out that Sammi had hit Hooters running and fled to the upper
floors immediately, finding refuge in one of the rooms on the fourth floor,
and her mother texted Jenna that she could find her friend there. At first she
couldn’t get an elevator because they had stopped working and she was
advised not to take the stairs, but after a while, the elevators returned to
service and she was able to get to the fourth floor.
Jenna ran down the halls screaming her friend’s name: “Sammi!” No
one answered. Then, a man opened his door and told her, “Okay, you need
to get in here. There’s a shooter out there.” Jenna began: “Is my friend in
your room? Her name is Sammi and—” The man stopped her: “No, but you
need to get in here, there is a shooter in this hotel.” So she went in, he
closed the door behind her, and she joined the fifteen or so people who had
already taken refuge in the ordinary little room.
“Everybody had these injuries, and so all of a sudden these women start
coming up to me and begin taking off my dress and stuff. And I’m like,
‘What are you doing? Stop!’ They’re saying, ‘No, honey, you’ve been hit.
We need to figure out where you’ve been hit. She’s a nurse.’ But I told
them, I haven’t been hit.” They persisted: “You’re in shock, you’ve been
hit.”
“So they take me into the bathroom, and at that point I knew I had been
hit, because I looked in the mirror, and I look like Carrie. There’s blood on
my face and stuff and everywhere else. So suddenly I’m just thinking, OK,
maybe I am hit. Even though it feels like I’ve been down in the lobby for an
hour and I never felt like I was hit.
“And so anyway, they get me in the shower, and they’re literally
spraying me off with my dress on, and I’m thinking, this is lovely.” The
women washed her down and found a wound in her leg—a graze with
flecks of shrapnel in it that they removed and cleaned. But it wasn’t large
enough to have drenched her in blood. The man whose room they were
hiding in gave her some warm socks.
They were safe, but in the swirl of panic and misinformation, the
hysteria became relentless. Someone in the room tied the sheets together so
people could climb down to a courtyard below in the event the shooter
came to their door. Everyone was certain that killers were roaming the
hallways of the Hooters Casino Hotel.
Jenna finally managed to connect with Sammi, who was hiding in
another room on the same floor. Their respective hosts accompanied them
to a halfway point, and then Sammi came back to the room where Jenna had
found refuge.
“And that’s the first time that I felt like we might get through this,”
Jenna says, “because I was sure I’d never see Sammi again, regardless
whether it was her or me. So when I saw her, I felt as though, OK, there
might be the light at the end of tunnel. And so this was probably an hour
and a half in and there was still nothing on the news. And then, finally, we
got the news on the TV and they started to give kind of a report. And that’s
when it felt like, ‘OK, they’re taking care of this.’”
As the night went on, it became evident that the shooting had ceased
and that police had the situation largely under control—not to mention that
much of what they had been hearing throughout the night had been
misinformation that only heightened the chaos. The local media had also
contributed to it, spreading unconfirmed rumors, including a report of
bombs in the basements of the hotels.
“It’s just crazy because really I was only in danger two minutes,
basically. But I felt in danger for three hours . . . just sure I was going to die.
Like saying my goodbyes to my family. In hindsight, I think that’s one of
the hardest parts of the process—realizing you didn’t have to be panicked
for that long.”
The sheer chaos and terror of the scene had spread confusion like
wildfire, including among police, who had great difficulty figuring out
where the gunfire was coming from. There were reports it was coming from
the Luxor casino resort, the great glass pyramid that is next door to both the
Mandalay Bay resort and the concert venue; other reports suggested it was
coming from the festival grounds. Finally, police had observed the flashes
of gunfire that were emanating from the thirty-second floor of the Mandalay
and dispatched a tactical squad to put an end to it.3
Stephen Paddock had already had an encounter with a Mandalay
security guard named Jesus Campos, who had gone to the thirty-second
floor in response to an open-door alert and promptly found he couldn’t enter
through an access door because Paddock had screwed it shut with a metal
bracket. Entering through another door, Campos went to the door of the
room where Paddock was waiting with his arsenal of fourteen AR-15s
equipped with bump stocks that enabled him to fire them like automatic
weapons, along with eight AR-10s, a revolver, and multiple one hundred–
round magazines loaded with ammunition. When Campos knocked,
Paddock opened fire through the door.4
One of the rounds caught Campos in the thigh, and he took refuge in an
alcove. Inside, Paddock took a hammer and bashed out the windows of both
suites he had rented. A Mandalay maintenance man named Steve Schuck
approached his door about that time and barely evaded another round of
gunfire. Campos, from his alcove, warned him to take cover, which he did.
Then Schuck got on his radio and warned the hotel’s security office about
the shooting on floor thirty-two.
Ranging from room to room with his weapons, Paddock had unleashed
a relentless fusillade of more than eleven hundred high-velocity rifle rounds
into the audience gathered below him. Then, just as suddenly, he had
stopped. When the tactical team came to his door about ten minutes after he
had first opened fire, the gunfire had ceased; when the team broke through
an hour later, he was already long dead from a self-inflicted gunshot.5
Fifty-eight people died at the Route 91 festival that day, thirty-six of
them women. Another 851 people were injured, about half of them with
gunshot and shrapnel wounds. Hundreds more were injured in the scramble
to escape—broken legs, torn ligaments, deep cuts.6
There were thousands of survivors that day. They all endured the same
trauma—and all of them are still in various stages of recovery. Many, like
Jenna, receive therapeutic treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.
Despite the shooter having been taken out, the chaos continued for
hours afterward as reports poured in of shooters at other hotels, including
the Hooters where Jenna and Sammi had taken refuge. Eventually, as the
morning light grew brighter outside and it became clear that things were
safe again, the two of them wandered back downstairs, out of the casino,
and onto the streets again. They navigated their way back to their hotel,
showered and changed, then caught the 11:00 a.m. flight home to SeaTac
airport just as they had planned all along.
Camden was waiting for Jenna. It was a heartfelt embrace, but it took
Jenna a while before she could hug her daughter for as long as she wanted.
In her mind, she had already died and left her little girl behind, and now it
felt like a betrayal for which she could not forgive herself.
That was just the beginning of her journey back. Three years later, she is
still traveling it.
“Now I live thinking it’s going to happen everywhere,” Jenna says. “I
don’t think I’m entirely wrong. I think that because of the way that things
have been going, people just shoot other people in Walmarts these days. So
I don’t go to Walmart. I do avoid Walmart.”
She says she still finds herself affected “in strange ways,” adding that
she keeps wondering if or when things will start getting better. “He didn’t
take away a day, he didn’t take away a week—he’s taken so much joy from
my life, and that’s the hardest part.
“I drive by the school where kids are playing and I can’t have a nice
thought like, ‘Oh, I can’t wait to drive past this elementary and see Camden
playing out there.’ No. I have to think, ‘Oh, it would be so easy for
someone to hop the fence and just kill all those kids.’
“That’s what I’ve been robbed of. It’s hard—like just having nice
thoughts, it’s hard to have nice thoughts to think they get ruined by such a
horrible thing. I think that’s what is the hardest part.
“I can walk through what happened with anybody; it’s not traumatic to
go through that for me anymore. It’s what I’ve been left with that’s so
destructive.”
Even having the blessing of a happy-go-lucky toddler in her life
becomes a kind of curse: “I mean, I think it helps to have [Camden] in my
life, but I think that she is also a source of my worry. I think I’d have less
worry if it was, ‘Oh, if I get shot in this movie theater, my parents will be
sad, my brother will be sad, but no one needs me.’ So I think having
someone that needs you almost makes it worse because you’re thinking,
‘Someone needs me out there.’”
As is so often the case with trauma, it actually hits the hardest at quiet
moments when she’s not busy and it blindsides her. “I don’t look forward to
lying in bed at night,” Jenna says. “After this, I would never want to go to
bed and not go to sleep for an hour because I don’t want that time alone
with myself to think about things because I know where I’m going to go. So
I’ll either read or watch TV to the point where I can barely keep my eyes
open. So then I don’t even have the ability to sit there and have some sort of
deep thought.
“Because if I start thinking—why do these things happen in the world?
It’s just too much. Because there’s no answer.”
________
According to Jones, the whole event was part of a scheme to cow the
American public into accepting sweeping gun controls: “With this event
and this attack, the leftists, the globalists, the social engineers are going to
use those dear lives of those poor people who were snuffed out to try to
wound what’s left of our republic and complete our journey into
disarmament,” he warned, claiming that comments after the shootings by
Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton were proof that they intended to start a
“race war in America.”
Although Jones had promoted the idea of a looming civil war for
decades, his projection-fueled rhetoric reached stochastic terror levels as the
broadcast continued:
Near the end, he concluded with a red-faced rant warning his audience
that their “globalist” enemies intended to round them up in concentration
camps and murder them en masse, with a flourish worthy of Slim Pickens:
________
The six hundred or so teenagers who had gathered in late July 2011 for
summer camp on Utoya Island—an idyllic twenty-six-acre getaway on
Lake Tyri, about twenty-four miles northwest of Oslo, where the Norwegian
Labour Party’s youth wing, the AUF, had for years held its annual summer
training sessions for up-and-coming young political leaders—were in the
kind of place where violence, especially hate-filled, relentless lethal
violence, did not seem even remotely possible. It was so peaceful. So
beautiful. The atmosphere at the camp, as always, was convivial and
uplifting.16
All of which is a large part of why Anders Breivik chose Utoya Island
as his target. It seemed so inconceivable. Certainly, what happened was.
The kids at Utoya were the nation’s future political elite, and that too is
why Breivik targeted them. A number of prime ministers had attended the
camp, crediting the camp with shaping their careers, and were known for
returning and giving speeches. That morning of July 22, former prime
minister Gro Harlem Brundtland addressed the kids. Breivik originally
wanted to target the camp while she was there—his plan was to behead her
on video then post it on the Internet—but encountered a hitch in his plan
when his departure from downtown Oslo was delayed.17
Then again, when he departed Oslo that morning, the city was in utter
chaos because he had set off the truck bomb he had created in the
Volkswagen Crafter van at his farm in the center of the government office
district, near prime minister Jens Stoltenberg’s offices. It was a McVeigh-
size blast that killed eight people.18
Most of them were government workers, including Anne Lise Holter, a
fifty-one-year-old senior consultant to Stoltenberg. There was Hanna
Endresen, sixty-one, a receptionist in the security department; Jon Vegard
Lervag, thirty-two, a lawyer in the justice department; Ida Marie Hill,
thirty-four, an adviser to the ministry of justice; Hanne Ekroll Loevlie, a
thirty-year-old senior government worker originally from rural Tyristrand;
twenty-six-year-old Kjersti Berg Sand, who worked on international issues
in justice. A couple of random passersby—Tove Ashill Knutsen, fifty-six,
who was on her way to a subway station, and Kai Hauge, thirty-two, who
owned a nearby bar and restaurant—also were killed. Another 209 people
were injured, twelve of them severely. However, none of the government
main ministers was among the injured, including Stoltenberg.19
Many of the teens on Utoya that day had parents who worked in Oslo’s
government district, so when word of the bombing reached the island, the
camp suspended activities so attendees could contact their parents. In the
meantime, they were told that a police officer from the mainland was on his
way over on the small ferry that serviced the camp.
That officer was actually Breivik, dressed in a police uniform with
tactical armor and carrying high-powered rifles in cases.20 He had driven to
Utoya in his mother’s vehicle and arrived at the ferry dock, requesting it be
summoned to fetch him, telling them his name was “Martin Nilsen.” But
camp director Monica Bøsei became suspicious on the ferry ride back and
summoned security director Trond Berntsen when they reached shore.
When Berntsen asked to see some ID, Breivik pulled out his pistol and
dispatched both Berntsen and Bøsei on the spot.21
It was done out of view of the teenagers, however, so when Breivik
walked up to the open field where they were assembled, he asked them to
gather around him so he could debrief them on the bombing in Oslo. When
they had encircled him, he opened fire with one of the high-powered rifles.
The kids screamed and scattered, and when the open space had cleared a
minute or so later, there were only tents and fallen teenagers who had been
shot as they fled.22
Breivik then walked into the camp’s café/canteen, where thirteen teens
had taken refuge. He burst in the doors and announced: “You will die today!
Marxists, liberals, members of the elite!” Then he began shooting all of
them, first with a pistol, then finishing them each with a shotgun blast to the
head. Afterward, he went outside and finished off the teens who had fallen
in the open field outside in identical fashion.23
For the next hour or so, Breivik conducted a systematic search for camp
attendees around the rest of the island. He tried getting into the schoolhouse
building and found it was locked; after firing a couple of rounds through the
lock without it budging, he moved on to the kids hiding in the woods. His
rifle was loaded with special hollow-point bullets designed to cause the
most damage to his victims’ internal organs and body tissue.24
As he walked along, he shouted: “You’re going to die today, Marxists!”
And when he found them—often clustered together in protective huddles—
he cold-bloodedly opened fire. As he reached the island’s edge, he found
more of them similarly clustered beneath rock outcroppings, at which point
he simply mowed them down.25
Many of the teens decided to try swimming for it. Breivik began firing
at them from shore, shouting as he did so. Others swam back to shore when
they realized they couldn’t make it, only to encounter Breivik walking up to
them there and firing off more rounds from his rifle.
Police had been desperately trying to reach the island, but a variety of
bureaucratic snafus prevented them from reaching Utoya until ninety
minutes or so after Breivik’s arrival. When they got there, Breivik freely
surrendered, smirking and telling them that all would become clear soon.26
They also found seventy-seven dead teenagers. Another 110 were
injured, 55 of them with serious wounds and lifelong consequences.
“Sacrifices.”
________
Dylann Roof very nearly didn’t go through with it after meeting and
spending an hour or so in Bible study with the people he had targeted for
death. They were “so nice,” he later told investigators that he almost
changed his mind and called off what he called his “mission.”27
His primary target was the senior pastor of the church—Emanuel
Baptist AME in Charleston, South Carolina—whose Bible study sessions
he had joined the evening of June 17, 2015. The pastor’s name was
Reverend Clementa Pinckney,28 a man who had gained renown as national
civil rights leader and had recently been in the news advocating for the use
of body cameras by police officers in the wake of a highly publicized
shooting of a black man in Charleston.29 Roof told investigators later that he
picked Emanuel because of its long significance in the history of civil
rights.
Roof entered the church around eight in the evening, dressed in a long-
sleeve gray shirt and jeans with a fanny pack rotated in front, as the
gathered congregants broke into groups for Bible studies. He asked for
Reverend Pinckney by name and then sat next to him. For the next hour or
so, a pleasant conversation about scripture commenced, and Roof appeared
to be enjoying himself. But at some point around 9:00 p.m., his
countenance changed, survivors said, and he suddenly pulled a pistol out of
the fanny pack and shot Reverend Pinckney point-blank in the head, killing
him instantly.30
Then he aimed at the eighty-seven-year-old woman across the table
from him, Susie Jackson. Her nephew, twenty-six-year-old Tywanza
Sanders, was seated next to her and began speaking in a calm voice to Roof,
telling him he didn’t need to do this.31
“Yes I do. I have to do it,” Roof replied. “You rape our women and
you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.” Sanders dove across
the chair to protect his aunt, and Roof shot him next, then Susie Jackson.
Then he systematically went around the room, shooting everyone in it,
shouting: “Y’all want something to pray about? I’ll give you something to
pray about.” Two survived by pretending to be dead. Roof left one person
alive to act as a witness to the carnage then tried to shoot himself, but, after
reloading five times, he had run out of ammunition. So he walked out of the
church and into the night. He was arrested the next day in North Carolina.32
“Sacrifices.”
________
The first victims of Elliot Rodger’s rampage were two roommates with
whom he shared an apartment in Isla Vista and one of their friends. It’s not
clear what set the final spark, but that day—May 23, 2014—Rodger lay in
wait at the apartment as each of them returned home, where he ambushed
them with a large knife. He left the bodies of the roommates—Weihann
“David” Wang, twenty, and Cheng Yuan “James” Hong, twenty—in their
bedrooms and the corpse of their nineteen-year-old friend, George Chen, in
the bathroom.33
Rodger appears to have waited several more hours in the apartment
before setting out in his black BMW with his Sig Sauer P26 pistols on what
appears to have been a meticulously planned mass killing. Except, of
course, that it went awry almost immediately.34
The initial plan, after all, called for him to “enter the hottest sorority
house of UCSB” and then to “slaughter every single spoiled, stuck up,
blonde slut I see inside there.” That was what he said, anyway, in the
“Retribution” video he uploaded to YouTube as he drank his vanilla latte at
Starbucks that evening.
That didn’t work out. He did indeed walk up to the front door of the
Alpha Phi sorority house near the UCSB campus and knock on it at about
9:30 p.m. No one answered. It was getting dark.35
However, there were random people nearby on the lawns of neighboring
sororities, so he began shooting at them instead—wounding three women
from the Delta Delta Delta sorority, two of them fatally—before getting
back in his car and peeling away.
The short remainder of Rodger’s life consisted of a mobile gun rampage
from inside his car through Isla Vista. He shot and killed a man standing in
front of a nearby market and then continued shooting: a man and woman
standing outside a residence a short distance away, a woman waiting at a
crosswalk, another woman walking along a sidewalk. He also used his car
to intentionally strike several pedestrians, as well as a man riding a bicycle,
all of whom were injured but survived.36
When sheriff’s deputies cornered him at an intersection, they exchanged
gunfire, and Rodger suffered a wound to the hip. Still careering madly
through the streets, he whipped around and took out one last bicyclist
before shooting himself in the head—at which point his car veered off to
the side and crashed to a halt.
All told, in addition to Elliot Rodger, there were six people killed in Isla
Vista that day, and fourteen more injured, several severely.
“Sacrifices.”
________
Yonge Street is the main artery in downtown Toronto, and it’s usually
packed with traffic, especially in the tony North York City Centre, where
Alek Minassian drove his van and parked long enough to post his Facebook
message praising the incels.
For Minassian, however, traffic was no object. Starting up the big van,
he hopped the curb at Yonge and Finch Avenue and began driving at a high
rate of speed down the sidewalk, mowing down every pedestrian he
encountered.37 He remained on the sidewalk for several more blocks, a trail
of bodies in his wake. He seemed to be aiming especially for women. One
witness said that Minassian appeared to be like someone playing a video
game, trying to kill as many pedestrians as possible.38
At one point the sidewalk became too narrow and he was forced back
onto Yonge Street, where he remained for a couple of blocks, still careering
along at high speed but without hitting anyone, until he reached Park Home
Avenue. Veering back onto the sidewalk, he again began mowing people
down as he encountered them.39
Minassian’s van had struck so many people that its front end was badly
damaged, and it finally lurched to a stop just as he turned a corner onto the
sidewalk on Poyntz Avenue. He sat inside until a police officer reached the
van. When he got outside, he had something in his hand, which he pointed
at the officer, screaming: “Shoot me in the head!” The officer, gun in hand,
instead patiently talked him down and arrested him. Minassian still awaits
trial, scheduled for November 2020.
The scene behind him: bodies strewn along the avenue, shrieking sirens,
and aid workers trying to rescue the victims. There were shoes randomly
tossed in the street and torn pieces of clothing and briefcases.40
The final toll: ten people killed and fifteen injured, many critically.
Eight of the ten dead were women, as were twelve of the injured.
“Sacrifices.”
________
When Destinee Magnum and her Muslim friend boarded the Green Line
MAX train in downtown Portland on May 26, 2017, it was just an ordinary
early rush-hour ride at around 4:00 p.m. The two teenage girls, one black
and outgoing and the other shy and wearing a hijab, managed to find seats
out of Union Station and were quietly chatting with each other when they
pulled into the station at the Lloyd Center.41
That was where Jeremy Christian got on board.
Unlike the night before, when he had harassed Demetria Hester, this
train was full of people. But that didn’t stop Christian. No sooner had he
boarded than he spotted Destinee and her friend, immediately standing in
front of them and shouting at them about how they didn’t belong in
Portland. That Muslims should die, because they had been killing Christians
for hundreds of years. That the girl in the hijab should go back to Saudi
Arabia.
The girls got up and fled to the back of the train, seeking another seat.
Christian followed them, still shouting.42
Three men, regular commuters who had been watching the scene
unfold, stepped between Christian and the two women. One of them—Rick
Best, fifty-three, a Portland city employee—stood closest to Christian and
tried using reason: “I know you are taxpayer, but this is not OK. You’re
scaring people.” Christian kept shouting that it was about his free speech.
As they neared the next stop, Taliesen Myrddin Namkai-Meche, twenty-
three, pleaded with Christian: “Please get off this train.”
Another of the trio, Micah David-Cole Fletcher, twenty-one, recognized
Christian from the alt-right march the month before, when he had marched
with the counterprotesters and Christian had made a scene. He tried pushing
himself between Christian and the women.
“You fucking touch me again and I’ll kill you,” Christian snarled at him.
At that moment he lost his balance and fell back; when he came back up, he
had a knife in his hand, and he plunged it into Rick Best’s neck, then turned
to Namkai-Meche and Fletcher and did the same to each of them. Then he
ran from the train and away from the Hollywood station. The two dark-
skinned girls fled the train, too, leaving their belongings behind.43
Rick Best bled out before help could arrive and was declared dead at the
scene. Namkai-Meche, who told everyone who stopped to help that he
loved them, died in the intensive-care ward at the nearby hospital. Only
Fletcher, who remained in the hospital for a month recovering from his
wound, survived the attack.
At his arraignment on murder and attempted murder charges—but,
mysteriously, no hate-crime charges—two days later, Christian ranted
behind the glass for the benefit of the press.44
“Free speech or die, Portland!” he shouted. “You got no safe place. This
is America! Get out if you don’t like free speech!”
After hearing the official charges being read, he shouted again: “Death
to the enemies of America! Leave this country if you hate our freedom.
Death to antifa!
“You call it terrorism, I call it patriotism!”
“Sacrifices.”
________
Buckey Wolfe had made himself a kind of crude sword that he kept in the
mother-in-law apartment at the back of his parents’ home in Seattle, where
he lived. It was a two-edged piece of steel about four feet long, which had
been sharpened at the tang end to a fine point with razor edges.45
The evening of January 6, 2019, his brother James paid a visit. They
chatted for a while, and their dad handed them some food before they
retreated to Buckey’s mother-in-law’s apartment.
At 6:40 p.m., Buckey called 911 and told the dispatcher that he had
killed his brother by ramming the crude sword into his head.46
“Kill me, kill me, I can’t live in this reality,” he said and rambled on:
“God told me he was a lizard,” he added.
When police arrived, they found James Wolfe dead inside the
apartment, fatally wounded by the sword. Buckey was gone, but police
found him shortly afterward, walking through the neighborhood about a
mile away.
When detectives interviewed him at police headquarters, he told them
“that their eyes and mouths were changing and asked if they could see
lizards in the room,” according to court records.47
The Proud Boys shortly afterward issued a lengthy statement claiming
that Buckey Wolfe had never been a member of their organization, claiming
he had “never made it past our strict vetting protocols.”48 But in fact, nearly
a year before, Wolfe had posted the certificate on his Facebook page that
verified his “first degree” membership, along with multiple group shots
with other Proud Boys out on the streets.49
The judge ordered Wolfe detained without bail, agreeing with
prosecutors that he posed an extreme danger to the community. He awaits
trial in Seattle, having been found mentally competent by the court in July
2019.
“Sacrifices.”
________
TANGLED TALES
It was clear that, even though the army colonel was trained in public
relations and handling a crowd, he was up against something completely
different.
“When we have a federal government that cannot tell the truth, how do
we know that what you’re saying is true?” asked one of the commission
judges, reading from an audience questions card. The overflow audience of
about five hundred people packed into the Bastrop County Commission
chambers in Texas cheered loudly.1
The officer, Lieutenant Colonel Mark Lastoria of U.S. Army Special
Operations Command, was there to try to explain to his rural audience how
and why the largest training exercise in the army’s history, code-named Jade
Helm 15, was scheduled to take place over the course of two months in a
broad swath of the nation’s countryside, mainly in seven states in the
Southwest and interior West, that summer of 2015.
“We’re truly invested in everybody’s personal rights and their privacy,”
Lastoria told the audience. “That’s what we live for, to support the
Constitution of the United States and that’s what everybody wants to
protect. . . . We’re not going to be interfering with people’s livelihoods, or
negatively impact their farms. Some of these counties that we’re going to be
in, they’re very concerned that we’re going to disrupt recreational activity.
It’s not going to happen.”
The first questioner came to the microphone, introduced himself, then
asked: “In spite of people’s overwhelming opposition to this program,
would the commission consider rescinding their invitation to these guys?
And would the court be offended if I told the colonel that I didn’t believe a
single word that he just said?”
There was more raucous applause.
Someone then told Lastoria that Jade Helm appeared to be nothing more
than “a preparation for martial law.”
“It is not a preparation for martial law,” the colonel answered.
“That’s what you say,” his interlocutor replied. Again, the crowd
cheered.
“It has nothing to do with martial law, period. We are Title 10 forces,
not Title 32, nothing like that. No martial law in any way, shape, or form.
We basically simply want to train United States Special Operations forces
for future operations overseas. That’s it,” Lastoria explained.
No one in the audience seemed convinced. Notably, there were large
numbers of Infowars T-shirts among the people voicing the most
skepticism, and indeed the questions reflected claims that Alex Jones had
been making on his nationally broadcast conspiracy theory program.2
According to Jones, Jade Helm was tantamount to martial law. He told
his listeners that because the special operations forces from four branches of
the U.S. military would be blending in with local populations, they were in
fact secretly training for an eventual battle to disarm Americans.
“Jade Helm 15 is more than just a military exercise, it’s also an exercise
of the new field in geospatial intelligence using human domain analytics to
map the politics and thoughts of any nation, state, city, right down to the
individual,” he told his audience.
Jones had been circulating similar theories for a while. The previous
year he had claimed that a much smaller army training exercise involving a
mockup of an urban invasion zone actually was intended to prepare armed
forces for an attack on American citizens, labeling it part of “a giant
buildup for war with the American people.”
All along, army officials dismissed these claims, particularly as Jade
Helm came under attack. The exercise, they asserted, was nothing more
than “routine training to maintain a high level of readiness for [special
forces] since they must be ready to support potential missions anywhere in
the world at a moment’s notice.” Lastoria told reporters that “the concerns
expressed center around misinterpretations.
“Unofficial sources providing inaccurate information on Jade Helm
want people to believe that it’s something other than a training exercise,”
Lastoria said.
The theories even spread to Fox News, where Megyn Kelly described
the conspiracy theorists merely as “critics”: “Well, conspiracy theories are
running wild tonight about the army’s plan for a multistate training exercise
this summer called ‘Jade Helm 15,’” she told her audience. “While the
military says they’re just training soldiers for the realities of war, critics say
the army is preparing for modern-day martial law.”3
What apparently drove the theorists to leap to the conclusion that the
exercise was nefarious in intent was a map that had been leaked in
connection with the army’s mock strategy for the exercise showing that
Texas and Utah, as well as parts of California, had been designated “hostile
territory.” Jones and others immediately claimed this reflected the Obama
administration’s view of those states and suggested that this was more
preparation for martial law.
“Training with the police, training with locals in plainclothes, quote,
doing suspicious activities, is to train the police to work with the military in
covert operations, and to condition the military to accept it, and to condition
the public to accept it, and then when we cover it and talk about it, they
practice a psyop in real time, putting out this information,” Jones claimed.4
Infowars was hardly alone. Some right-wing radio talkers from Texas
began making similar claims. Next News Network, a right-wing website
with a history of regurgitating propaganda from Russian websites, also
chimed in with a series of reports on Jade Helm. In one video, an announcer
intoned: “This is without doubt the largest public-conditioning exercise in
American history. This, as the public watches Cheyenne Mountain
reopening in anticipation of an EMP attack, and key operations of the New
York Federal Reserve moving to Chicago in the event of a natural disaster.
Now the event that is truly on the horizon is anyone’s guess, however, one
thing is for sure: troops will be ready and trained to take over your town
when it happens.”5
One of the men who questioned Lastoria in Bastrop was particularly
keen to know if a memorandum created by the Department of Homeland
Security in 2009 describing how right-wing extremists might target military
veterans for recruitment—and citing certain conservative causes, including
gun rights and abortion, as among the issues around which radical terrorists
might act—had any role in the army’s designations of the area as “hostile.”
Infowars interviewed him afterward. “I think what concerns me the
most is, I am a student of history, and I know that governments go
tyrannical,” the man said. “And I know that our government, through
Homeland Security, has labeled people like the kind of people that live in
Bastrop that are conservative gun owners, libertarians, veterans, the
government’s labeled those people as potential terrorists. And so I do see an
odd correlation between a huge military buildup and a hostile designation
for the state of Texas in this area.”6
Conservative Texas politicians echoed this paranoia. Representative
Louie Gohmert of Texas released a statement on Jade Helm, noting, “When
leaders within the current administration believe that major threats to the
country include those who support the Constitution, are military veterans,
or even ‘cling to guns or religion,’ patriotic Americans have reason to be
concerned.”7
U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, who was gearing up for a run as a presidential
candidate that year, blamed it on President Obama: “When the federal
government has not demonstrated itself to be trustworthy in this
administration, the natural consequence is that many citizens don’t trust
what it is saying.”8
Shortly after the Bastrop gathering, Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, sent
a letter to the commander of the Texas State Guard ordering his men to
monitor the Jade Helm operations. “During the training operation, it is
important that Texans know their safety, constitutional rights, private
property rights and civil liberties will not be infringed,” he wrote. (It later
emerged that much of the hysteria regarding Jade Helm was in fact the
product of a Russian disinformation campaign intended to sow chaos
among American voters and disrupt an American military exercise.)9
That afternoon before the Bastrop commission, Lastoria tried to
reassure the crowd by appealing to their patriotism. “I’d like everyone to
not confuse apples and pumpkins, OK?” he told the audience and pointed to
his army patches. “This institution has been around for 240 years. You may
have issues with the administration, OK? So be it. But this institution has
been with you for 240 years. Period.”
However, what soon became clear was that his very presence there was
interpreted by the conspiracists who packed the room as powerful evidence
of a psychological operation, or “psyops,” as it’s known in the conspiracy
world, by the army.
“It appears that the psyops are taking place right now,” one questioner
insisted. “And psychological operations, meaning psychological warfare,
that would be a weapon being used against citizens if you’re talking about
blaming it, obtaining information, all that sort of stuff.”
Lastoria, of course, patiently denied this: “One, there’s not a psyop
campaign going on associated with that. This is an information brief, and it
has nothing to do with private citizens. . . . That’s not normally part of a
training exercise.”
Another asked if, by blending in, the soldiers participating would be
gathering information on people in the community “that they’ll come in
later and pick everybody up.”
Lastoria repeated: “Everybody truly wants this to be something that it is
not. All we want to do is make sure that our guys are trained for combat
overseas. That’s it.”
The more he sounded persuasive and reasonable, the worse things got.
“My question is, why is it not reasonable for me as a private citizen who
just questions things—maybe some conspiracy theories, but some of us just
have questions,” one man asked. “Why is it not reasonable for me to see
this as absolute training for a domestic rendition program where eventually,
worst-case scenario, in a potential battle, good folks like yourselves who
swore an oath would go after Alex Jones, Joe Biggs, Jakari Jackson—why
is it not reasonable, sir, for me to be scared of that?”
“There’s a reason that people have problems with this,” an elderly
woman interviewed by Infowars said afterward. “It’s not irrational fears.
It’s well-founded fears.”
Later that summer, as the exercise actually got under way and every
locale in which it was supposed to occur came to realize that the whole
operation was very low-key and designed not to create problems, much of
the paranoia simmered down. However, in the mind of conspiracy theorists,
the very lack of such evidence is actually proof that something nefarious is
occurring, and so a number of the dedicated “Patriots” worked into a lather
by Infowars began taking matters into their own hands.
In August, gunshots were fired for two consecutive days near the Camp
Shelby Joint Forces Training Center in Mississippi’s Perry County, where
4,600 National Guard and Army Reserve troops were participating in the
exercise. No one was arrested, but Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant
ordered some of the military personnel to be armed as a precaution.
A few days later in North Carolina, federal agents assigned to the Joint
Terrorism Task Force in Charlotte arrested three men, including a
previously convicted felon, on a variety of conspiracy and firearms
violations. The trio had purchased assorted high-quality military gear and
ammunition and were making homemade explosives in anticipation of
interacting with Jade Helm troops, charging documents claimed.10
Walter Eugene Litteral, fifty, Christopher James Baker, forty-two, and
Christopher Todd Campbell, thirty, expressed “their disapproval of the Jade
Helm military exercises” to an FBI informant, their federal criminal
complaint said.
At trial, it emerged that Litteral had been building an arsenal of
explosive devices, including tennis-ball bombs and a variety of pipe bombs,
as well as simple bombs using coffee cans, gunpowder, and ball bearings.
He even had figured out how to make a dummy grenade into a live one.
Litteral, prosecutors said, “believed that the United States government
intended to use the armed forces to impose martial law, which the
conspirators planned to resist with violent force.”
The suspects also discussed a ninety-nine-acre “base camp” near
Clover, South Carolina, where they intended to plant booby traps and lure
government forces in and “kill them.”
All three men pleaded guilty. Litteral was sentenced to twenty-two
months in prison, while Baker and Campbell each received twenty months.
When Jade Helm wrapped up in September 2015, it was almost as if it
had never happened as far as the communities where it was held were
concerned.11 But following the uproar around it, the army has not attempted
a similar exercise of that scale again.
________
________
________
________
It was going to be just a routine business flight. When Kenneth Arnold took
off from the airport in Chehalis, Washington, with his little CallAir Model
A airplane on June 24, 1947, en route to Yakima on the other side of the
Cascade Mountains, things were business as usual until he neared Mount
Rainier and spotted a row of flying objects.
They appeared to him to be tracking his rate of speed, about 100 miles
per hour, and at times well outpaced him. He later described the objects as
being like “flying discs” or “saucers.” When he reached Yakima, he told
everyone he could about what he had seen, and soon the story was in all the
papers around the country. Headlines dubbed them “flying saucers.”51
Thus began the enduring mystery of unidentified flying objects, aka
UFOs. For much of the 1950s and 1960s, the objects spotted by Arnold
suddenly were seen seemingly everywhere else in the world as well, by
people whose stories were usually less credible and more fantastic with
each sighting. People produced photos of “flying saucers” that later turned
out to be thrown hubcaps or simply bad retouching jobs.52
The sensation spread to Hollywood, which produced science-fiction
thrillers like The Day the Earth Stood Still, in which an alien emissary
arrives on a mission of peace in a disc-shaped spaceship, or conversely
Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, in which aliens from a dying planet attack
Washington, D.C., but are eventually defeated. The airborne saucers
remained a sci-fi stereotype for decades afterward, with featured roles in
television series like The Invaders and Lost in Space in the 1960s, and even
into the 1990s in the alien-invader movie epic Independence Day.
The mystery surrounding the flying saucers never subsided, and
speculation about their possible origins not only grew outsized, but
eventually metastasized into conspiracy theories, especially as government
officials continued to deny their existence and to debunk the claims of their
existence with regularity. Combined with random reports that government
officials had in fact encountered aliens, or perhaps had alien corpses or
other evidence of their existence held in secret, the legend grew into a
cottage industry devoted to “exposing the truth” about UFOs.
A key component of the legend included the idea that a cadre of
government agents who wear dark business suits and sunglasses as their
uniforms—known generically as “men in black”—was primarily
responsible for suppression of this “truth.” Eventually, Hollywood made use
of this as well, with sci-fi television series like The X Files and movie
franchises like Men in Black depicting the exploits of these same
government agents in a mostly heroic light.
Another infamous public event—the assassination of President John F.
Kennedy in 1963—had similarly sparked a raft of conspiracy theories,
especially after the official investigation into the event concluded it had
been the act of a single man, despite seemingly contrary evidence. The high
levels of uncertainty were piqued by the intense speculation about who was
behind the death, with suspicion coming to rest on everyone from the CIA
and J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI, to mob bosses angry about Kennedy’s anti-
gangster policies, and seemingly everything in between. Many of these
conspiracy theories were laden with similar tales of sunglasses-wearing
men in black suppressing evidence and quietly “suiciding” people who
spoke up.53
The industry around the UFO phenomenon never entirely went away.
The conspiracism it engendered on radio programs like Art Bell’s nationally
syndicated Coast to Coast AM show and in multiple pseudo-documentaries
and sensational books readily blended over into other theories suggesting
that nefarious government or corporate forces were secretly conspiring to
harm or enslave the public in other, often health-related, ways. In particular,
the belief that the government had secret cures for cancers locked away and
deliberately suppressed or that it was engaged in a variety of plots that were
slowly poisoning the population—through fluoridation of the water supply,
various food supplements, vaccinations, or even in chemicals in the
contrails left behind by jets—became part of the same industry, and often
their theories intersected with those involving UFOs or even old anti-
Semitic theories.
In the 1980s, for instance, a conspiracy theorist named William Cooper,
who in addition to publishing books ran a radio show based in Arizona,
published a kind of all-encompassing, hypercomplex metatheory titled
Behold a Pale Horse. It proposed that JFK’s assassination, along with a
number of other infamous mysteries, were secretly the doings of Illuminati
—who, moreover, were not people at all, but nefarious invading aliens from
another planet who were able to disguise themselves by appearing to be
human. It also proposed that the Protocols were produced by the Illuminati
and that one could easily read them as a manual for an alien takeover of the
Earth.54
Cooper’s book and radio show, as it happened, are credited with playing
a major role in the early development of the “Patriot” militia movement of
the 1990s.55
________
There was another major conspiracy-minded movement of the 1950s that
had a lasting impact, though it was aligned politically with the far right of
American politics from the beginning: namely, the anti-Communist
movement that emerged from the aftermath of World War II and the ensuing
“Red Scare” led by Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin.
An earlier Red Scare, between 1917 and 1920 that arose in the wake of
the Russian Revolution, was similarly constructed around fears of an
international Bolshevik conspiracy with designs on American democracy.56
It had produced several notable outrages against the Constitution,
particularly the passage of the Sedition Act of 1918, which targeted
immigrants as potential terrorists, and the so-called Palmer Raids, in which
federal authorities rounded up and deported suspected leftist radicals from
the Italian and Jewish communities. However, it had been rather short-lived,
cooling down especially after the attorney general for whom the raids were
named issued a national warning about an attempted coup against the
government on May Day 1920 that turned out to be completely false.57
The Red Scare that reverberates in American politics even today began
taking off in 1947, shortly after Russia and the United States ended their
wartime alliance and began the series of mutual hostilities that soon came to
be known as the Cold War. This time, there was a round of public hysteria
generated in the press about possible Communist spies handing over
American military secrets, particularly the recipe for a nuclear bomb. This
fear intensified in 1949, when the Soviets successfully tested their first such
weapon, and then became feverish in 1950, when a State Department
employee named Alger Hiss was arrested and convicted of spying for
Russia and a physicist associated with America’s own nuclear bomb was
exposed for passing key information to the Soviets. The couriers included
an American couple named Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who eventually
were executed for spying.58
The same year, Senator McCarthy spoke to a gathering of Republican
ladies in Wheeling, West Virginia, and brandished a sheet of paper upon
which, he declared, were the names of known traitors working for the U.S.
government: “I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that
were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the
Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy
in the State Department,” he told them.
The remarks sparked a flurry of national headlines for the senator and
thrust him into a leading role among the demagogues who began making
hay from the hysteria, which included congressmen like Richard Nixon of
California, who served on the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Almost overnight, McCarthy became one of the best-known politicians in
America and began using his new fame to smear his targets and political
opponents. He campaigned that fall for a Republican challenger to one of
his Democratic Senate colleagues, claiming that the incumbent—who went
on to lose by forty thousand votes—was “protecting Communists” and
“shielding traitors.”59
In 1953, McCarthy became chairman of the relatively mundane Senate
Committee on Government Operations, but he managed to twist the
investigatory powers of one of its subcommittees into a stage-managed
investigation of Communists operating within the U.S. government. He
hired a ruthless attorney named Roy Cohn as his chief counsel, and they set
about making life hell for a number of government employees, first at the
federally owned Voice of America radio network, then at the State
Department. Meanwhile, a blacklist produced by the House Un-American
Activities Committee condemned hundreds of people working in the
entertainment industry in Hollywood, including a large number of well-
known actors, directors, and screenwriters, to nearly a decade of
unemployment.60
McCarthy met his Waterloo, however, when he set out to investigate the
U.S. Army in 1954. His Senate subcommittee’s hearings were broadcast
live on national television, which was still in its infancy. Though McCarthy
exploited the heavy exposure for the opportunity to accuse a number of
people of aiding the Communist Party, in the end it did not serve McCarthy
well: the more people saw of him, the more they came to see him as a
reckless bully and a liar.61
The culminative incident generally credited with ending his career as a
demagogue came when the army’s lead attorney, Joseph Welch, responded
angrily to McCarthy’s insinuation that a young Boston lawyer was also a
Communist by saying: “Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator.
You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have
you left no sense of decency?”62
At the end of the year, the Senate voted to censure McCarthy.
Afterward, he became a pariah in Washington and in the press, especially as
he began to drink more than he already had. He died in 1957 from liver
failure attributed to his alcoholism.
However, the legacy of the Red Scare remained vibrant and active for
the better part of the 1950s and even into the 1960s, as the Cold War
proceeded apace. The paranoia, in particular, took on a life of its own
thanks to the rise of organizations like the John Birch Society.
Founded in 1958 by candy magnate Robert Welch, the JBS—or
“Birchers,” as they became better known—immediately picked up
McCarthy’s cudgel and began beating a broad range of American
politicians with it, accusing them of being “soft” on Communism or even
“card-carrying members of the Communist Party,” as Welch was fond of
labeling his opponents, including President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who he
described as “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.”63
However, the smears were only the tip of the scapegoating spear that
was the Birchers’ main enterprise: the real heart of the organization was its
conspiracism, which distinguished it from other anti-Communist
conservatives, particularly the William F. Buckley contingent that
denounced the Society and ridiculed them as “far removed from common
sense.”64
According to Welch, “both the U.S. and Soviet governments are
controlled by the same furtive conspiratorial cabal of internationalists,
greedy bankers, and corrupt politicians. If left unexposed, the traitors inside
the U.S. government would betray the country’s sovereignty to the United
Nations for a collectivist New World Order, managed by a ‘one-world
socialist government.’” Birchers developed a fixation with the UN, whose
“real nature,” they claimed, “is to build a One World Government.” All
around the nation, particularly in areas where the society was popular,
billboards sprung up with bright blue letters: “Get US Out! of the United
Nations.”65
The society became one of the earliest progenitors of health-related
conspiracy theories. First, in the 1950s, many Birchers became involved in
protesting the use of fluoride in public water supplies (a health measure that
was just then gaining prominence). They argued that it was a secret
Communist conspiracy that would surreptitiously inflict a host of ills on an
unsuspecting American public.66
Perhaps the most incisive portrayal of the John Birch Society’s mindset
was delivered in a brutal black-comedic satire, Stanley Kubrick’s 1963 film
Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,
about a Bircherite general who sets off the end of the world because of his
paranoid beliefs. Trapped in his offices with a hapless British attaché played
by Peter Sellers, the cigar-chomping General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling
Hayden) explains why he sent an entire wing of nuclear-armed bombers to
attack Russia: “I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration,
Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international
Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily
fluids.” Fluoridation, Ripper explained, was “the most monstrously
conceived and dangerous Communist plot we have ever had to face.”
The society revived that tradition in the 1970s, when it began promoting
claims that an apricot-seed derivative called laetrile was a secret cure for
cancer that had been deliberately suppressed by the Federal Drug
Administration. The reality was that not only were there no known clinical
benefits for cancer patients using the drug in tests, but consuming it actually
put them at risk of poisoning from cyanide, which laetrile can release in
humans when digested. Nonetheless, the JBS became involved in pro-
laetrile campaigns in at least nine states, while the pro-laetrile organization
“Committee for Freedom of Choice in Cancer Therapy” had a board almost
entirely comprised of people with official ties to the society.67
Through the 1960s and 1970s, the society—which largely remained on
the fringe of the national conversation due to their marginalization by
mainstream pundits—mostly recruited new members with surreptitious
evening dinners that ended with filmstrip presentations and literature, often
of leading local businessmen, with varying degrees of success. It was a
slow recruitment strategy.
Their numbers didn’t flourish, but the society’s quiet influence remained
steady over the years, particularly in rural areas. By the 1980s, they had
largely vanished from the political scene—but the roots they had created in
the preceding decades came springing back to life in a new form: militias.68
Chapter 5
“It’s going to end up like this,” Trochmann told his audiences. “The most
mild and calm of scenarios will be: ‘Would you like to eat today? Give me
your guns. Would you like your children back from school today? Give me
your guns.’ That’s the mildest of versions you’ll see.”2
Trochmann toured the Pacific Northwest and the Inland West for much
of the 1990s, delivering these talks in a fairly uniform fashion, traveling to
places like Mount Vernon, Washington; Klamath Falls, Oregon; Orem,
Utah; or Jordan, Montana—anywhere that had a base of active “Patriots”
who would invite him to speak at their local community centers. He’d
collect a nominal speaking fee and then sell books and survival gear and T-
shirts at the tables set up around the speaking venue.
What was essential, however, was getting people to sign up for Militia
of Montana (MOM) catalogs. Once he had them on his mailing list, he was
able to sell even greater mounds of gear and goods through the catalogs
themselves, which featured a buckskin-clad sniper firing from a treetop
with an ancient rifle. It fit with Trochmann’s fantasy of a guerrilla
resistance in the manner of old colonial-era combatants, duking it out with
the federal government from their mountain retreats in the West, which he
sold relentlessly to his readers.
Inside the catalogs, Trochmann’s first few pages were often devoted to
the dozens of VHS videos he sold to his fellow Patriot movement true
believers, featuring lectures given by himself and dozens of other leading
movement figures, men such as Mark “from Michigan” Koernke, MOM
spokesman Bob Fletcher, and even mainstream political figures like
Representative Helen Chenoweth, the Idaho congresswoman who toured
the far-right “Patriot” chicken-dinner circuit speaking on behalf of the
“Sagebrush Rebellion” in the years before she first won election in 1994.
The following pages featured a full library of books, including a variety
of “survival” manuals that suggested forming independent “sovereign”
communities even before the apocalyptic downfall of society they all
expected to happen soon. Some were simple army survival manuals. Other
books detailed conspiracy theories, such as the claim that the Federal
Reserve Bank was the nexus of the New World Order plot, or another
detailing the satanic origins of Planned Parenthood, or the book devoted to
Hillary Clinton’s witch’s coven. And at the back of the catalog were various
kinds of survival gear, including gas masks and hazmat suits of dubious
provenance, as well as food-preservation systems and other items designed
to come in handy during an apocalypse.
I also encountered Trochmann’s beliefs in weather manipulation when I
interviewed him in Montana at a little roadside log-cabin café. Federal
conspirators, he assured me, had already put the mechanisms in place for
the big coup. “Most of this Emergency Powers Act that we’ve been
studying that they put together. . . . They have to have a replacement for war
to get down to those levels and still retain the legitimacy of power. What
might that be? Catastrophes to deal with? We know that
electromagnetically, they control our weather now. There’s all kinds of
documentation of that. We’ve got documentation right from the United
Nations that say that people have to get a permit to change the weather
somewhere.”3
On the big-screen TV behind us, pictures from a national broadcast
showed a hurricane slamming into Florida, and an announcer displayed the
storm’s path on a map.
Trochmann looked at the owner of the café, and they exchanged
knowing glances. “See the hurricane?” Trochmann asked him. “Boy, that’s
really late, isn’t it?” The owner nodded.
You mean, I asked, this is part of the weather-control pattern?
“Sure,” Trochmann said. “Naples, Florida, got hit at the same time
Naples, Idaho, did.”
Coincidence, maybe?
“Yeah, right,” he said. “And I have another bridge for sale for you.”
________
That wasn’t all. The whole FEMA camps thing was coming true, he told his
audience.
Not a word of this, of course, was true. And on January 1, 2000, everyone
woke up and went to work and brushed their teeth and their electricity was
fine and the traffic signals were fine and their bank accounts were fine and
everything mostly went along as normal, since the software companies had
done as promised and fixed the bug.
Meanwhile, the people who had listened to Alex Jones and John
Trochmann and the multitude of Patriot cohorts and had followed their
advice to prepare for the upcoming apocalypse by salting away stores of
beans and rice and water and other foods (especially the expired canned
military rations that Trochmann specialized in) were left wondering what
the hell to do with them now.
The reputation of Jones and his “Prison Planet” radio operation—soon
to be renamed “Infowars”—lingered in a kind of twilight zone until
September 11, 2001, when the worst terrorist attack on American soil in
history was perpetrated in New York and Washington, D.C., and more than
three thousand Americans were killed, which also opened up a brand new
dimension for the world of conspiracy theorists.11
Jones, naturally, was among the first to leap into the breach, claiming
that it was all a false flag, perhaps perpetrated by Israeli intelligence,
perhaps by the Bush administration itself—who knew?—but they, Jones
and his army of followers, had to investigate! Within hours—and before the
dust from the collapsing twin towers had even settled—the theories about
the secret perpetrators of the attacks began to mount and swell into a mind-
boggling pile-on.12
Over the next several years, Jones became the leading peddler of
theories generated by what they called the “9/11 Truth Movement,” but who
became known best by their short handle, Truthers. Initially the ranks of the
movement were filled with a large number of far-left conspiracists who
wanted to blame the Bush administration for the attacks, but these voices
over time were minimized and drowned out by the Infowars and other far-
right conspiracists who blamed the New World Order, for whom Bush and
his White House were merely pawns.13
As time went on, the theories became more elaborate: There were no
planes that crashed into the Pentagon; that was an illusion the conspirators
created to cover for the bomb that actually was dropped on the place. The
towers in New York couldn’t have collapsed because the melting point of
steel is much higher than burning jet fuel could have created. Over time, as
they multiplied and turned inward upon themselves, often feeding a frenzy
of competition among the theorists, the name “Truther” became the essence
of ridiculousness.14
Certainly, mainstream conservatives—despite taking on a starkly
authoritarian strain to their rhetoric as well during the invasions of
Afghanistan and then Iraq, particularly—maintained a deep divide from
conspiracy theorists like Jones, since Infowars’ biggest target at the time
was George W. Bush. Infowars’ audience kept building during these years
to numbers in the multimillions. But pundits like Rush Limbaugh and Bill
O’Reilly—the real voices of the conservative establishment—made their
loathing of the Alex Joneses of the world unquestionably clear during the
Bush years. It took the candidacy, and then the presidency, of a black man
to change all that.
In the meantime, the nativist elements of the American Right, many of
them with deep connections to those same mainstream Republicans, were
busy building their own alternative universe of conspiracy theories about
immigration down on the American borderlands. This world, too, involved
militias, mixed along with classic nativist rhetoric about an “invasion.”
________
The idea of a citizens’ border watch grew out of the longtime embrace by
the radical right of vigilante violence, à la the Ku Klux Klan. Indeed, the
very first such operation was organized in 1977 by David Duke and Tom
Metzger, both longtime figures in the Klan of the 1970s and beyond.15
They called it “Klan Border Watch,” and all it really amounted to was a
photo opportunity featuring a couple of carfuls of white men in Klan robes
driving around the border crossing at San Ysidro, California, and Duke
vowing that vast numbers of men now would begin patrolling entire
stretches of the border under his command. No such force existed, of
course, and no one heard about Duke’s outfit again, though Metzger
continued running racist stunts along the border for decades afterward.16
The concept gained new life in the 1990s with the rise of the small cell
militia concept as part of a larger “leaderless resistance” against the federal
government. The main progenitor of the concept was a California man
named Glenn Spencer, who ran an outfit called American Patrol that
claimed Latinos wanted to reclaim the U.S. Southwest for Mexico as part of
Reconquista—that is, to revive the legacy of Spanish conquerors.17
The whole thing, of course, was an elaborate conspiracy theory spun, as
so many such fantasies are, out of a thin thread of factual truth woven with
reams of fabricated nonsense: A small claque of Hispanic radicals in the
1960s had suggested creating a new Latino homeland they called “Aztlan”
and even made maps outlining their dreams, which then faded mostly into
the mists of history until Glenn Spencer discovered them and began trotting
them out to his fellow nativists as proof that all these Latino immigrants
represented a conspiracy to invade the United States surreptitiously and
then take it down at a given signal. (Japanese immigrants of the 1920s
certainly were familiar with these kinds of suggestions.)
In 1999, Spencer put it like this: “The consul general says Mexico is
reconquering California. A Mexican intellectual suggests that anyone who
doesn’t like Mexicans should leave California. What else do you need to
hear? RECONQUISTA IS REAL. . . . EVERY ILLEGAL ALIEN IN OUR
NATION MUST BE DEPORTED IMMEDIATELY. . . . IF WE CAN
BOMB THE TV STATION IN BELGRADE [in the former Yugoslavia]
WE CAN SHUT DOWN [U.S. Spanish-language stations] TELEMUNDO
AND UNIVISION.”18
Around the same time, Spencer’s Voices of Citizens Together (VCT)
released a video titled Bonds of Our Nation hawking this conspiracy theory:
a Mexican invasion is racing across America “like wildfire,” Spencer told
his viewers, lamenting that there were now drugs in Iowa and gang
takeovers in Nevada, not to mention “traitors” in the Democratic Party, the
Catholic Church, and among the “corporate globalists,” which many
Patriots were now using as the euphemism for the New World Order.19
The video is a litany of vile racist tropes dating back to the nineteenth
century: these immigrants—Latinos from south of the border this time—
were bringing crime, drugs, squalor, and “immigration via the birth canal,”
threatening to overwhelm white people and decent American civilization
with their impure filth, their disease, their stupidity, their laziness.
Mexicans, he warned, are a “cultural cancer” from which Western
civilization “must be rescued.” They are threatening the birthright left by
the white colonists who “earned the right to stewardship of the land.”
And this invasion, he claimed, was not any accident. It was a well-
planned conspiracy to bring America to its knees. Working in league with
Communist Latino activists and their allies in America, Spencer claimed,
Mexico was secretly deploying a little-known but highly effective stratagem
“to defeat America.” Spencer claimed these conspirators had already
succeeded in seizing control of California.
Spencer named this conspiracy the “Plan de Aztlan.”
“Some scoff at the idea of a Mexican plan of conquest,” the video’s
narrator says, then warns that a “hostile force on our border” engaging in
“demographic war” against the United States threatens to overwhelm whites
with sheer numbers: “Mexico is moving to capture the American
Southwest.”
Spencer sent every member of Congress a copy of this videotape and
had it delivered to a number of congressmembers by Betina McCann, the
fiancée of his friend neo-Nazi Steven Barry.20
“If the Border Patrol had done its job, using the technology that is
available to us, we could stop these people,” Spencer said in an appearance
on the Donahue show. “This is an invasion of the United States!”21
Spencer moved his operations to Arizona in the early 2000s and
renamed it American Border Patrol. That was when things started to take
off for him and his border-militia concept. Taking Spencer’s cue, Casey
Nethercott, another Arizona resident, started a border-watch operation
called Ranch Rescue. They developed legal problems in short order.
Nethercott, who had done prison time in California for assault in the
1990s, and some of his fellow Ranch Rescue members in 2003 assaulted
two Salvadoran migrants who had crossed the border on foot and wound up
on a ranch where the nativist border watchers operated. The migrants were
held at gunpoint, and one of them was pistol-whipped and attacked by a
Rottweiler. With the assistance of the Southern Poverty Law Center
(SPLC), the migrants sued their attackers and won a $1 million civil
judgment against Ranch Rescue.22
A California schoolteacher who had migrated to the Arizona desert
town of Tombstone, finding employment as an actor in the daily
reenactment of the gun-fight at the OK Corral in the town’s tourist center,
decided to join the action. In 2002 he announced he too was organizing a
border militia, hoping to stop illegal border crossings in the area south of
Tombstone. His name was Chris Simcox, and initially he named his outfit
the Tombstone Militia, but after a while he adopted a more media-friendly
name: Minuteman Civil Defense Corps.
What really motivated Simcox, he was eager to tell you, was border
security: his belief that more 9/11-style terrorists were secretly sneaking
over our borders with Mexico because, as anyone could see, it’s actually
very easy to do so if you don’t mind hiking for dozens, if not hundreds, of
miles in open searing desert. He believed “globalists” were conspiring with
government officials to leave the door open for this Trojan horse disguised
as immigrant workers.23
What was also clear was both Simcox’s overweening paranoia, as well
as the potential for real violence that ran as an undercurrent in everything he
did. Simcox was insistent that immigrants were providing cover for
terrorists crossing the border.
“It is frightening to think that just one terrorist hiding among thousands
of illegal immigrants who come across the border each day could easily
carry chemical, biological or even nuclear materials into the U.S.,” Simcox
told a reporter in 2005. “At this point, it’s not a question of ‘if’ but of
‘when.’”
Naturally, translating this paranoia into government action was the
entire purpose of his organization. “While officials are talking, Minutemen
are acting,” Simcox pronounced. “They need to put our money where their
mouth is, and start doing something about our borders.”
Simcox’s paranoia also made him volatile: “Take heed of our weapons
because we’re going to defend our borders by any means necessary,” he
told an audience in 2003. “There’s something very fishy going on at the
border. The Mexican army is driving American vehicles—but carrying
Chinese weapons. I have personally seen what I can only believe to be
Chinese troops.”24
This became the cornerstone of the right-wing belief—eventually
mainstreamed by the Republican Party—that national security is utterly
dependent on immigration police and that border crossers represent a
significant potential terror threat.
For Simcox and the Minutemen, the rubric of reason for the “citizen
border watches” they organized all revolved around “national security”—at
least when the TV cameras were on. When they were off, it was a different
story: Minutemen border watchers were fond of explaining in private to
people they thought were fellow participants that the best solution to
stopping “the invasion” (as they liked to call it) of Latino immigrants they
hoped to catch in the act was to start shooting one or two of them.
One of them even explained it on camera to a documentarian once: “No,
we ought to be able to shoot the Mexicans on sight, and that would end the
problem. . . . After two or three Mexicans are shot, they’ll stop crossing the
border. And they’ll take their cows home, too.”25
In 2004, a California nativist named Jim Gilchrist heard Simcox being
interviewed on a right-wing radio program and got the idea to make the
border watch a national callout that would last for a month on the border.
He contacted Simcox and the Minuteman project was started.26
It all came together in a big media event in April 2005 that really only
lasted about a week but drew tons of national TV coverage in the border
area south of Tombstone. About the third week into what was supposed to
be a month-long affair, everyone had pulled out. Simcox and Gilchrist, it
turned out, hated each other and barely were able to maintain a façade for
the first couple of weeks. Near the end of it, the Minutemen founders
announced they were splitting into two separate organizations.27
There was always an obvious problem with the claim that the
Minutemen were about “border security”: if that was their chief concern,
then why weren’t they focusing their efforts on the three thousand–plus
miles of border the country shares with Canada? After all, when it comes to
terrorists crossing our borders with intent to bomb—not merely entering the
United States via airport with false papers, as the 9/11 plotters did—the
only known case fitting that description was on the Canadian border: in
1999, when “Millennial Bomber” Ahmed Ressam was caught in Port
Angeles, Washington, with a carful of bomb-making material and plans for
striking Los Angeles in hand. The Ressam case is particularly instructive,
because it revealed that—in contrast to Mexico, where no al-Qaeda cells
have been known to exist—there exists an established network of Islamist
operatives in Canada.28
Simcox, of course, had an answer for that: within a year of the
Minuteman Project’s national debut, he would be organizing citizen
watches along the Canadian border, as well, most notably in Washington
State near the crossing at Blaine. That didn’t turn out too well, either.29
It was, first of all, a mere smokescreen, as reporters found when they
ventured out to the Canada border watches. No one was out to catch
terrorists sneaking over the border (which, after all, comprised only a six-
foot-wide ditch in some places); they were there to catch reporters who
would dutifully repeat their “border security” schtick—which in turn
became the common way for nativists to describe their chief concern when
it came to immigration. It sounded innocuous and devoid of ethnic
xenophobia, when it was in truth neither.30
Because if you spent any time with these Canada border watchers, you
pretty quickly ascertained that what had them agitated was not skilled white
Canadian laborers sneaking over the border through the ports (which is
actually fairly common) but Latino immigrants sneaking over the Mexico
border. Those were the “illegal immigrants” they were out demonstrating
against.
“Border security” was just a verbal façade pasted over the real source of
these nativists’ anxieties. It was a coded phrase for the underlying intention:
“Keep out the brown people.”
Strikingly, this rhetoric gradually became embedded both in
conservative rhetoric and later, under a Donald Trump administration, into
official government policy. Republican politicians during the tenure of
President Barack Obama refused to advance comprehensive immigration
reform—the only sensible long-term solution to the problem—on the
dubious grounds that such reform needs to wait until after the border is fully
and completely secured. It’s a familiar saw: “We need to secure the border
before we can pass reform.”
Moreover, it will at best put only a dent in the problem. That’s because
about 40 percent of all undocumented immigrants come here legally to
begin with, through various kinds of visas, and then simply never leave.
Another significant percentage of them arrives through human smuggling
operations that are not deterred by fences.31
As Representative Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, told a Forbes reporter:
“Simply stated, a fence is a 14th century solution to a 21st century
problem.”32
Moreover, insisting on emplacing “border security” before providing a
sane and legal path to citizenship for millions of immigrants is a classic
case of putting the cart before the horse. Border security is realistic only
when one’s borders are not overwhelmed, and it can’t be achieved until the
conditions that overwhelmed the Mexico border—particularly the trade
policies that damaged the Mexican economy and drove millions of people
out of work there, along with antiquated immigration laws and policies ill-
suited for a modern nation competing in a twenty-first-century global
economy—are brought under control.
Current immigration laws and policies, however, are both chaotic and
manifestly inadequate, and that’s because the toxic brand of politics
practiced by the Minutemen led inevitably to the failure of the existing
system. The border-militia movement itself also foundered, split in the
years after the big 2005 Arizona demonstration by its own innate toxicity,
amid egotistical turf wars and accusations of financial fraud and
mismanagement. It finally crumbled apart after a movement leader named
Shawna Forde (who first joined during those Canada border watches) led a
home-invasion robbery on the Arizona border that resulted in the murders
of an Arivaca man and his nine-year-old daughter in 2009.33 Other
Minutemen and border watchers have, since then, been embroiled in even
more criminality and mayhem, including another murderous rampage in
2012 in which a neo-Nazi border-watch leader in Arizona gunned down his
girlfriend and her family.34
Perhaps the final fitting coda for the whole Minutemen episode came in
2015, when Chris Simcox himself was arrested and eventually convicted on
multiple counts of child molestation involving young girls under the age of
ten, one of them being his own daughter. So much for keeping American
families safe.35
________
It didn’t take long for the white supremacists to come crawling out of the
woodwork after Barack Obama announced his candidacy for the presidency
in February 2007. By June, a Ku Klux Klan leader named Railston Loy (he
went by “Ray Larsen”) warned that the black senator from Illinois was a
likely target for assassination: “Well, I’m not going to have to worry about
him, because somebody else down South is going to take him out,” he said.
“If that man is elected president, he’ll be shot sure as hell.”36
Neither Obama nor the rest of the country took those warnings much to
heart, and he was indeed elected president a year or so later. As his
candidacy had gained momentum, however, so did a kind of parallel
reaction among far-right conspiracists, who—failing any actual successful
plots against Obama—turned to their old standby weapon: conspiracy
theories.
Both the Internet and right-wing media—particularly Fox News—
became riddled with the spurious claims about Obama that had been
circulating well before he had even announced his candidacy, including
charges dating back to 2004 that he was secretly a Muslim. Not only did
these old smears resurface, new ones were generated partially from them:
accusations that Obama was actually a black radical, beholden to an
extremist black Chicago pastor named Jeremiah Wright, got full airings not
just on Fox News but on CNN and every other mainstream network.
Eventually, it became clear there was no truth there.37
To the eternal frustration of the people generating them, that proved true
of pretty much every other conspiracy theory cooked up during the 2008
campaign to prove Barack Obama a crook or a fraud or a radical Muslim.
For a while, theorists claimed that Michelle Obama had used the word
“whitey” in a talk that was taped—though no such tape ever surfaced.38 A
photoshopped image that was nonetheless widely believed and distributed
made Barack into a cigarette-smoking Black Panther. He was rumored to
have refused to say the pledge or to wear an American flag pin, none of it
true.39
It was during these years that Alex Jones’s Infowars operation—which
was control room central for the conspiracy-theorist world—came into its
own as an online media giant. In 2011, it was estimated that, with the
website’s ten million monthly viewers, its reach exceeded that of
established firms like The Economist and Newsweek, not to mention that the
reach of his radio show now outdid both Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.40
The spread of anti-Obama conspiracism was bolstered by the arrival on
the cultural scene of the Tea Party: an ostensibly “grassroots” conservative
resistance to the Obama administration that, for its first six months or so of
existence, was actually propped up by a combination of right-wing
corporate organizing funds and extremely heavy promotion on Fox News
and other right-wing media, which led to mainstream news organizations
dutifully following suit. Initially Tea Party gatherings helped the right gum
up the works on health-care reform (with, predictably, such conspiratorial
claims as Sarah Palin’s accusation that Democrats were planning to create
“death panels” to decide who lived and who died), but once that effort
failed and Obama’s signature Affordable Care Act was passed, the
corporate money withered away, and the TV interest dried up, too. The Tea
Party notion of an organized resistance to the Democratic presidency—
already festooned with “Don’t Tread on Me” banners lifted straight from
the Patriot movement of the 1990s—became a more genuinely grassroots
movement, spreading into the rural areas, away from the TV cameras,
where the far right was already well organized.41
Within a year or so, the Tea Party had evolved into a new, even more
reactionary phenomenon: the revival of “Patriot” militia movement ideas.42
Outside groups such as the Oath Keepers—who recruit veterans and law
enforcement officers into an organization built around conspiratorial claims
about imminent government takeovers and gun confiscations—and the
“Three Percenters,” who see themselves as the vanguard of a “second
American Revolution,” attached themselves to the Tea Party at its national
gatherings and brought a disturbing militant edge to the events.43
After being largely dormant during the George W. Bush years, the
Patriot militia movement began to reemerge even before Obama took
office: after hitting a post-9/11 low of 131 militia groups counted by the
Southern Poverty Law Center in 2007, they suddenly returned to life in
2009 with 512, ultimately reaching an all-time high of 1,360 such
antigovernment groups in 2012.44
So even after Obama was inaugurated as president, the conspiracism
didn’t slow down—and actually became worse. The belief that Obama was
secretly a Muslim simmered among Republicans quietly during the next
eight years, gaining popularity especially among the party’s evangelical
Christian bloc. By the end of his tenure in 2016, some 70 percent of
Republicans believed it.
This belief was also burnished by what became the eventual centerpiece
of the web of conspiracy theories built around Obama’s presidency: the
“birther” theory, which arose from the bogus claim that the birth certificate
the candidate had presented to both federal officials and later to the press
proving his birth in the state of Hawaii in 1961 to an American mother was
somehow inadequate (even though it was the same form any other
candidate from Hawaii would present as proof of birth on American soil, a
constitutional requirement). They claimed it was merely the “short form,”
and began demanding to see the “long form.”45
Underlying the birther theory was similarly spurious information
suggesting that Obama had actually been born in Kenya (his father’s
homeland) or that he had forsaken his American citizenship while attending
school in Indonesia as a boy (also false). Yet despite each of these theories
being sequentially disproven, the legend lived on, along with demands that
Obama reveal his true, long-form birth certificate. The signs demanding this
document were commonly seen at Tea Party gatherings.
Into this breach stepped Donald Trump.
________
Trump really had only peripheral contact with the sketchy world of
conspiracy theories before 2011, but as with everything else the publicity-
hungry tycoon did, he leapt aboard the birther conspiracy bandwagon that
year with remarkable gusto. With little previous reference to interest in the
subject—but a March poll showing him leading among potential
Republican candidates—that April, he told reporters he had “looked into”
the questions about Obama’s birth certificate and that he now believed
“there is a big possibility” the president was in violation of the
Constitution.46
“I’d like to have him show his birth certificate,” he said. “And to be
honest with you, I hope he can.”
When there was a backlash to the remarks, he doubled down and began
talking about sending investigators to Hawaii to “look into it.” It made him
a hot guest on all the TV news talk shows, and he disingenuously proceeded
as though there was no racial component to his challenge of the president’s
credentials, in spite of the claims about Obama’s previously presented birth
certificate being entirely spurious.
It became such a hot topic, both on network talk shows and on the
Internet, that President Obama—who at the time was working furiously to
get a budget resolution passed through the House—requested Hawaii
officials to release his “long form” certificate, which showed exactly the
same information as the short version but with some more details, including
the hospital in Honolulu where he was born.
Of course, this was not enough for the conspiracists. It never is enough.
In a matter of hours, Alex Jones and his cohorts were publishing claims that
the long form, too, was in fact entirely bogus. Within days, their verdict had
spread through most of the hard-core Obama-hating right, and it became
accepted wisdom. Trump, meanwhile, harrumphed—after being humiliated
by Obama at the White House Correspondents dinner a few days following
the long form’s release—that he still “wasn’t sure” that it was real. Within a
week or so, he too was claiming it was bogus.47
What few people realized at the time, however, was that in addition to
the kooky conspiracist right all leaping aboard the birther bandwagon, they
were simultaneously being joined by most of the extremists on the racist
radical right, particularly white nationalists and neo-Nazis. These racist
elements, as time went along, became some of the most ardent and virulent
promoters of the theories, particularly at racist forums like Stormfront, as
well as emerging open message boards like 4chan and Reddit, where open
white nationalists could post at will without fear of censorship. And it was
in these realms that the movement that became known as the alt-right was
born.
Trump ultimately chose not to run for president in 2011 and more or
less lay low for the next three years, occasionally popping up to promote his
friend Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s bizarre Arizona-to-Hawaii “investigation” of
Obama’s birth certificate, as Arpaio kept insisting he had proven the long
form a hoax, which of course he never actually had.48
Nonetheless, Trump’s name kept turning up high in polls speculating
about possible presidential candidates in 2015, and when he announced his
candidacy in June of that year, he did it with his usual race-baiting gusto:
denouncing Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and vowing to deport them
all, he almost immediately attracted the support of the nativist anti-
immigrant factions, as well as many of the white nationalists who had
attached themselves to that movement. Indeed, nearly every SPLC-
designated hate group (there were about twenty of them) that supported
Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign actually announced their
fervid support for his candidacy within a month after he had announced, in
August 2015, his initial, draconian deport-all-twelve-million-undocumented
immigration policy (its language was later softened for general-election
consumption).49
Conspiracism was reaching a fever pitch that summer, too, with Alex
Jones playing no small role. The hysteria over Jade Helm reached its height
in mid-July that year, and it seemed to just fit with the mood of the times.
Certainly, Trump’s campaign positively bubbled with conspiracism:
Hillary Clinton, his nemesis, was portrayed as part of an “elite” who hated
the white voters Trump cultivated, and he frequently referenced
conspiracies to “rig the election.” At one point, he appeared on Alex Jones’s
Infowars program and embraced him verbally: “Your reputation is amazing.
I will not let you down,” Trump told him.50
As the election rolled along, Jones’s conspiratorial fanaticism reached
extraordinary levels. Late that summer, he went on a rant claiming that
Clinton and Obama were, in fact, demons from hell, quite literally. He told
his audience that they reeked of sulphur and that others couldn’t stand to be
around them. Hillary, in particular, inspired his visceral, purple-faced
loathing.
“That’s a frickin’ demon!” he screamed. “We’re gonna have President
Linda Blair, people, and I’m not gonna go along with it!” He looked like the
veins in his neck were going to burst.51
Near the election’s end, conspiracists poring over a raft of stolen emails
from Clinton campaign official John Podesta’s computer and released in
late October by Wikileaks discovered what they claimed were clues of an
elaborate child kidnapping-and-sex ring being run by a powerful cadre
attached to the Democratic Party and Clinton, as well as Obama. According
to these alleged clues, this global pedophilia ring—which purportedly
traded stolen children and transported them around the world so that
powerful people could have sex with them and then dispose of them
afterward—was run by Hillary and her evil cohorts out of a dungeon that
happened to be located in the basement of a pizza parlor in Washington,
D.C., called Comet Ping Pong.52
This became known as the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, and it spread
like wildfire among the Hillary-hating right, despite the fact that she had
lost the election and was no longer a serious political threat to them.
Naturally, there was no dungeon at Comet Ping Pong, nor even a
basement, as a gunman from North Carolina who insisted he was only there
with his semiautomatic rifle to “personally investigate” the restaurant
during lunch hour one day in December 2016 discovered when he blasted
several rounds into a locked door in hope of finding it. It turned out to be a
broom closet. The man was arrested.53
This certainly did not stop the theory from spreading. Indeed, each
round of evidence that the theory and claims of a global pedophilia ring are
utter fictions, fantastic concoctions of right-wingers’ fevered (and
projection-prone) imaginations, only produced another round of theories
and further doubling down on the belief, spread largely through media, of
the pedophilia ring’s existence.
Indeed, it was only beginning. Pretty soon, the QAnon “Storm” would
make Pizzagate look like tiddlywinks.
________
In an online universe where conspiracy theories not only sprout like kudzu
but attract bigger audiences the more outrageous and strange they grow, it
was probably inevitable that an uber-theory like “the Storm” would become
an overnight sensation.
Part Pizzagate, part New World Order, and part hyper-partisan wishful
thinking by defenders of Donald Trump, the Storm is a sprawling meta-
conspiracy, with actors ranging from Hillary Clinton to model Chrissy
Teigen, in which everything you know about the current investigations into
Russian meddling in the 2016 election and potential collusion with the
Trump campaign is upside down.54
Special Counsel Robert Mueller, in this alternative universe, is in fact
preparing to indict hundreds of Democrats (including Clinton, Barack
Obama, and financier George Soros) and Hollywood celebrities for their
roles in a massive worldwide pedophilia ring operated by “globalists” who
are conspiring to destroy Trump—and that the president himself is
masterminding this “countercoup.”
“What we have come up with is a possible coup,” explained conspiracy
theorist David Zublick in a late-November video, “not against Donald
Trump, but by Donald Trump, working with Robert Mueller to bring down
the Clintons, the Democrat Party, and the entire U.S. government involved
in pedophilia and child sex trafficking.”
In just a few short weeks in early 2018, the theory grew from a handful
of posts on fringe Internet chat forums to become the overwhelming
obsession of nearly every conspiracy theorist in the business, notably Alex
Jones and his Infowars operation, as well as social media figures such as
Liz Crokin. In addition to being a constant focus of discussion on Infowars,
dozens of YouTube videos and thousands of Twitter posts exploring various
facets of the conspiracy and presenting the usual dubious “evidence” to
“prove” it have shown up on the Internet.
The origins of “the Storm” lie in Trump’s cryptic remarks on October 6,
saying that a gathering of military leaders represented “the calm before the
storm.” When asked what he meant, Trump responded: “You’ll see.”55
Three weeks later, as New York Magazine’s Paris Martineau reported, an
anonymous poster on the Internet message board 4chan—one of the main
organizing and recruitment forums for the alt-right—who claimed he had
high-level “Q” national security clearance began publishing a series of
cryptic messages that he claimed were “intel drops” intended to start
informing the public through such channels about what was really
happening inside the White House and what Trump really meant by his odd
remarks.56
According to “QAnon,” Trump’s remark was a reference to the
indictments handed down by Mueller in late October, ostensibly related to
his investigation of the Trump campaign and its alleged collusion with
Russian intelligence. Most news reports about those indictments, reported
to number in the hundreds, presumed that they were related to criminal
behavior around the campaign.
Not so, said QAnon, who claimed that Trump was never really under
investigation. Instead, those indictments were all being directed at a
massive conspiracy involving a global pedophilia ring operated by high-
level Democrats and other “globalists” who were simultaneously part of a
plot to overthrow Trump’s presidency with a “deep state” coup.
This is the same pedophilia ring that was the focus of the Pizzagate
conspiracy theory. However, in the new expanded version of the theory, the
pedophilia ring had gone global, drawing in alleged participants from all
around the nation and occurring in locations ranging from Hollywood to
Europe. (One version of the pedophilia theory entertained by Jones claimed
that the child victims secretly were being shipped to a colony on Mars.)57
QAnon and the conspiracy theorists who piled on at 4chan, 8chan, and
on Twitter claimed that contrary to the running story in mainstream media,
this pedophilia ring is the real focus of Mueller’s investigation. The general
conclusion, spread through the #qanon hashtag on social media, was that a
wave of arrests—including Clinton, Obama, Podesta, Soros, Senator John
McCain, and a number of leading Hollywood figures and Democrats was
about to happen.
However, there was a credibility problem for QAnon early on, since he
posted in early November a scenario in which hundreds of arrests and
massive social turmoil were about to be unleashed within a matter of days.
“Rest assured, the safety and well-being of every man, woman, and child of
this country is being exhausted in full,” he wrote. “However, the
atmosphere within the country will unfortunately be divided as so many
have fallen for the corrupt and evil narrative that has long been broadcast.
We will be initiating the Emergency Broadcast System (EMS) during this
time in an effort to provide a direct message (avoiding the fake news) to all
citizens.”
November came and went, of course, without any such event. But that
didn’t dampen the enthusiasm among QAnon’s increasingly rabid horde of
fans.
These apparently included a significant portion of radical right social
media users, as indicated by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hate
Tracker, which monitors the spread of extremist ideologies and claims on
Twitter. The #qanon hashtag began trending in late November and steadily
grew during the ensuing weeks. By early January, it began regularly
trending upward.58
“The Storm” reflects in many regards the need for right-wing
conspiracists to constantly push the envelope of public discourse by
proposing increasingly outrageous and arcane theories just to distinguish
themselves in an ever-more-crowded field, especially on social media and
YouTube. People who run such conspiracy mills, particularly Jones, have
built their careers around attracting attention by pushing expansively
unhinged and groundless claims.
However, the #qanon phenomenon in the context of 2018 and beyond
also suggested that the spread of conspiracy theories was (and still is) being
inflamed to the point of hypertrophy, largely through the growth of social
media as a presence in people’s daily lives. The surprising rapidity at which
“the Storm” spread among shockingly gullible people is testament to the
extent to which such claims gain real life and become widely believed.
The hashtag’s rise on social media in late December 2017, probably not
coincidentally, happened at about the time that Alex Jones adopted the
QAnon theories and claimed them as his own: “A lot of what QAnon has
said, I had already gotten separately from my White House sources, my
Pentagon sources, my CIA sources,” he told his audience on December 24.
He went on:
Then there was Liz Crokin, the onetime gossip columnist turned
“investigative reporter” who writes for TownHall.com and has a large
following on social media, in large part due to her long-running claims that
pedophilia is rampant in America. She not only believes that QAnon is a
legitimate inside information source, but that it actually is Trump himself,
perhaps with the help of key aide Stephen Miller.61
She told an interviewer that she thought the president and his team had
been doing “intel drops” at 4chan and 8chan and on social media as a way
of red-pilling members of the public to soften the inevitable shock that will
accompany the wave of arrests that’s coming:
________
Conspiracy theories not only crept into the Oval Office during Trump’s
tenure, at times they appeared to rule the place, long after birtherism
withered into the nothingness from which it was born. And if the Jade Helm
incident had demonstrated how conspiracy theories can affect and alter
policies and official behavior, the Trump administration’s conduct
demonstrated what happens when the entire executive branch is in their
thrall.
In August 2017, the magazine Foreign Policy published a memo by a
man named Rich Higgins, who served on the staff of Trump’s National
Security Council. It was titled simply “POTUS and Political Warfare,” and
it opened with the assertion that the president was actually engaged in a
conflict with nefarious cultural Marxists in a conspiracy.
________
A still taken from another Fox News video that seemed to show a Star of
David sticker on the back of the cab of a truck hauling food for the caravan
migrants also made the rounds quite a bit. It was particularly popular on the
dark corners of social media, on white nationalist and neo-Nazi message
boards where it was displayed widely as proof that the Jews were secretly
behind the caravan. It was everywhere on Gab, which had become the
social medium of choice for white nationalists and other bigots after being
kicked off Twitter.78
One of the people who spread this photo was a forty-six-year-old white
Pittsburgh-area man and heavy Gab user named Robert Bowers. At one
time he had been a relatively normal employee at a local bakery, but he had
drifted for years after leaving the job in 2002, taking up work as a long-haul
trucker and finding odd jobs here and there. His neighbors at his apartment
in Baldwin Borough said they hardly ever saw him.
His computer and social media records, though, showed that Bowers
had developed an interest in the deeply bigoted Christian Identity
movement, which preaches that white people are the true children of Israel,
that today’s Jews are actually demonic imitators descended from Satan, and
that nonwhite people like blacks, Asians, and Latinos are soulless “mud
people” whose humanity is of secondary value at best. He burnished these
ideas with conspiracy theories and other far-right propaganda at message
boards like 4chan, the Daily Stormer, and Stormfront.
On Gab, his anti-Semitic rants were visceral and angry. And as the
month of October went on and the caravan dominated the news, his rhetoric
grew threatening.
He reposted a message that Western civilization is “headed towards
certain extinction within the next 200 years and we’re not even aware of it.”
A Jewish relief organization called the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society
became the focus of Bower’s ire: “You like to bring in hostile invaders to
dwell among us?” he posted in a comment directed at HIAS.
Bowers also facetiously thanked HIAS for a post listing groups that had
supported one of the organization’s refugee benefits. “We appreciate the list
of friends you have provided,” he wrote.
On Saturday, October 27, he published a final post. “HIAS likes to bring
invaders in that kill our people,” he wrote. “I can’t sit by and watch my
people get slaughtered. Screw your optics. I’m going in.”79
One of the Jewish congregations on that earlier HIAS fundraising list
met at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, located in the same Squirrel Hill
borough that once was known around the world as Mister Rogers’
Neighborhood. After filing his post, Bowers got in his car and drove the
thirty minutes or so it took to get to Tree of Life.
He had a Colt AR-15 semiautomatic rifle and three pistols with him. He
got out of his car and entered the synagogue. There were about seventy-five
people inside beginning their morning Shabbat service. He opened fire with
the AR-15 but, over the course of the next ten minutes or so, wound up
using all four of his weapons.
The first people he killed were two elderly Jewish men who had turned
to greet him; others were in their seats as he walked toward the front. The
room cleared quickly, leaving only a scattered few targets, so he began
shooting at people making last-second dashes out of the room.
Police arrived about ten minutes after he opened fire. Bowers then
opened fire on the police, engaged them in a standoff for about thirty
minutes, and surrendered.80
There were eleven dead, most of them elderly, and six people were
injured, four requiring surgery. Bowers now awaits trial in Pittsburgh.
Over at 4chan, where a number of users on the /pol/ board remembered
Bowers from his time spent there, the popular view was that the attacks
were “accidentally red-pilling” people. Others denied the attack, claiming it
was a false flag done by Jews to gain sympathy and that somehow Bowers
had fallen prey to their machinations. They created a hashtag for him:
#HeroRobertBowers.81
Chapter Six
It feels almost like a drug, the rush from learning and delving a new
conspiracy theory. It’s so powerful, so affirming, so empowering that of
course you come back for more. Who wouldn’t? That’s why they call it
red-pilling, right?
First, it’s the secret knowledge. Only you and a select few have
gleaned this information. The Powers That Be don’t want it to be known.
But it gives you special insight. You can see how things really work. You
can see things at work that others can’t.
Because you’re smarter and cleverer than them. This is part of the
ego boost: It’s a rush seeing evidence of your superiority to others so
clearly. The old word for the people who aren’t as insightful or fortunate
as you is sheeple, but nowadays the word is normies. Either way, they are
objects of contempt.
Even before there was an Internet, the core appeal of conspiracism was the
feeling of empowerment that came with it. But in the new age of social
media, the “new conspiracism”—the kind without evidence, built on a
combination of pure conjecture and a backlog of older conspiracy theories
that act as a kind of body of knowledge separate from normal rules of
evidence and factuality—that thrives and spreads in supposedly web-savvy
environments is in many ways susceptible to manipulation thanks to its
insistence on cynicism.
A lot of this has to do with what actually happens to us when we use
social media. Brain scientists have found that certain kinds of stimulation
on the Internet, particularly affirming and empowering responses people
receive in their interactions, arouse certain pleasure response centers in the
human brain, triggering the release of dopamine, a chemical messenger that
travels along a reward pathway, making you feel good. That’s why it
becomes so addictive.
When you’re on social media a lot and you’re not getting those reward
responses as frequently as you’d like, it all turns very negative. One
German study found that one out of three people surveyed felt “lonely,
frustrated or angry” after spending time on Facebook, often due to
perceived inadequacies when comparing themselves to friends.1 People
often found themselves negatively comparing themselves to the happy lives
they’d find their “friends” (most of whom, in fact, are actually strangers)
sharing online.
This experience negatively affects people’s self-esteem in often
profound ways, making them feel low self-worth, particularly when it
comes to their sense of agency in the world at large. In the great teeming
world of social media, it’s very easy to feel like a complete nobody. Unless,
of course, you can find a way to make yourself a somebody.
People who fall into this pattern of thinking become susceptible to
conspiracy theories precisely because they feel they have found a shortcut
to empowerment that only the clever can seize. The theories are a way of
reacting to uncertainty and powerlessness.
Samantha Kutner, a researcher who tracks the far-right Proud Boys
street-brawling organization, says that most of the young men she’s
interviewed have described their “red-pilling” journey beginning with a
kind of “cognitive closure” derived from “having seemingly random things
explained in some grand overarching narrative.”2
“I think there’s an information addiction component to it as well,”
Kutner says. “You could think of it as being addicted to bad information
that you don’t see as bad.”
The power of conspiracy theories, University of London psychology
lecturer Rob Brotherton explains, is their ability to “connect the dots,” to
help people make sense of the seemingly random events in their lives by
creating a pattern: “the cognitive equivalent of seeing meaning in
randomness.”3
“It’s incredibly empowering to believe you have the true picture of
reality and that everyone else is delusional,” observes Nancy Rosenblum, a
Harvard politics professor who has been cataloguing the costs of
conspiracism in her recent work. “And if you look at conspiracists today,
even the wackiest, like those writing about QAnon, they see themselves as
the cognoscenti. They understand how the world really works, and they
understand that the rest of us are brainwashed.”4
However, this alienation is never ameliorated by the continuing descent
down the rabbit hole; rather, the more isolated its inhabitants become, the
more likely they are to become angry, perhaps violent.
The larger problem in all this is that the attitudes and assumptions that
underlie conspiracism are common human traits—failings, perhaps, but also
woven into the warp and weft of our cultures, particularly in the United
States, where (as Reason editor and author Jesse Walker has helpfully
explored) our Founding Fathers were themselves prone to a paranoid streak
about conspiratorial elites, some of it well-founded, some of it fantasy.5
“Cognitive and political psychologists will tell you the cognitive
afflictions that result in the worst and most zealous kind of conspiracy
theory really are common; we all share them,” observes Rosenblum. “We
like to think that agents are the causes of things, rather than accidents or
unintended consequences being the cause. We like to think there’s a
proportionality between cause and effect, and that causes us to overreach
for explanations.”6
Brotherton explains that we know that “conspiracism is about more than
mere evidence” in large part because the very fabric of the theories—
namely, the seemingly random, disconnected events that are then woven
into a pattern—is rarely, if ever, interpreted as the product of what we
rationally already know about real conspiracies—namely, that they are by
nature limited in scope, number of actors, length of time, and breadth of
purpose. When a scenario falls outside those parameters, the likelihood of
its being real is infinitesimal.7
Anyone committed to a rational exploration of an event—especially a
highly public one, such as JFK’s assassination or 9/11—would consider the
possibility that unrelated conspiracies planned by independent groups with
their own idiosyncratic motives and goals were involved. That never
happens: “Instead, conspiracy theorists have a remarkable knack for
weaving a multitude of seemingly unrelated events together, into a single
rich tapestry,” Brotherton observes.8
________
What makes conspiracy theories feel so empowering is that they bring order
to chaos, make sense of events that don’t. Facts and arguments built upon
them are not just meaningless, they actually reinforce the conspiracist
narrative, becoming proof that the conspiracy has reached monstrous levels
for the believers. With “new conspiracism” particularly, the theories really
are no longer based on facts—which is why their believers are immune to
them.
Looking for and finding the patterns that have replaced facts in their
epistemological universes really become the central preoccupations of
people drawn into this alternative universe. This came up during a 2008
experiment by researchers Jennifer Whitson and Adam Galinsky9 in which
researchers asked participants to compose a short essay, after which they
would complete a variety of tasks.
This is why, for someone who operates in the workaday world outside
the realm of conspiracy theories, coming into contact with a conspiracy
theorist can be deeply unsettling, as though the whole ground of reality
shifts like a weird field around them. Certainly trying to have logical
conversations with them can leave people feeling discombobulated.
Philadelphia activist Gwen Snyder tracked the radicalization arc
reflected in the Facebook timeline of a local man named Tom who began
harassing and threatening her on Twitter. Snyder went through his Facebook
“likes” chronologically and found that they told a story.
“Tom didn’t start out as a guy who went around threatening to murder
the loved ones of anyone who dared to criticize politicians for associating
with white supremacists,” she wrote. “He was an army vet who supported
police. He watched the local Fox channel, sure, but he was as into the
Beatles and hardwood floors just as much as he was into the cops. He even
went out of his way to like his neighbor’s African braiding salon.”11
However, at some point, Tom changed, primarily when he discovered
Fox News. Shortly after that, his timeline began sporting “likes” for the
Conservative Tribune, for right-wing pundit Judge Jeanine Pirro, for right-
wing news site NewsMax, and then for Donald Trump. Next came Breitbart
News. “Soon, Tom is liking Steve Bannon’s stuff, ICE, local anti-sanctuary
politicians, white nationalist French candidate Marine Le Pen. And of
course, Ben Shapiro.”
What happened next was predictable: all these voices “bridged the gap,”
and in short order Tom was liking 4chan and 8chan and a number of alt-
right websites, as well as a page dedicated to “Three Percenter” militiamen.
He also linked up with local Republican politicians, including the mayoral
candidate over whom Tom had threatened Snyder. And he posted on
Twitter, defending the Proud Boys: “The Proud Boys aren’t what you think.
They’re just some big dudes daring you Antifa snowflakes to swing a chain
at them, or a pipe. Then, it’s lights out.”
Tom, now fully red-pilled, also became a full-on QAnon believer,
posting tweets threatening Hillary Clinton for allegedly posting “coded
assassination threats” against Trump.
Political scientist Joseph Uscinski explains that epistemology—the
system of how we know things—works in an entirely different way for
conspiracists:
________
________
These six rules are what psychologist Stephan Lewandowsky calls the
parameters of “conspiracist ideation,” the means by which conspiracy
theorists create their own self-reinforcing universe. In this world, he writes,
“nothing is as it seems, and all evidence points to hidden agendas or some
other meaning that only the conspiracy theorist is aware of.”13
Conspiracists are by nature untrusting of others, Lewandowsky says,
which is why “contrary evidence is often interpreted as evidence for a
conspiracy. This ideation relies on the notion that, the stronger the evidence
against a conspiracy, the more the conspirators must want people to believe
their version of events. This self-sealing reasoning necessarily widens the
circle of presumed conspirators because the accumulation of contrary
evidence merely identifies a growing number of people or institutions that
are part of the conspiracy.”14
University of Kent psychology lecturers Michael Wood and Karen M.
Douglas explain: “If you want to know how seriously someone takes
conspiracy theories, you should ask about how much they trust others,
whether they are agreeable or open-minded, how much they think people
are out to get them, and whether they routinely have unusual or paranormal
experiences. Conspiracy theorizing may be driven in part by evidence, but
is certainly driven by underlying psychological tendencies.”15
“Whether conspiracy theories reflect what’s really going on in the world
or not, they tell us a lot about our secret selves,” observes Rob Brotherton.
“Conspiracy theories resonate with some of our brain’s built-in biases and
shortcuts, and tap into some of our deepest desires, fears, and assumptions
about the world and the people in it. We have innately suspicious minds. We
are all natural-born conspiracy theorists.”16
The driver in all this, analysts consistently find, is people’s sense of a
lack of agency in the real world at large—a perfectly reasonable feeling,
given the overwhelming numbers of humanity and the ease with which
people become not just anonymous but disempowered economically and
socially in modern mass society. On social media, this often translates into a
syndrome long identified as a core reason people dive into these rabbit
holes—namely, fear of missing out (FOMO), “a pervasive apprehension
that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is
absent.”17
The narratives that the conspiracy theories construct are all about
explaining why their believers are being deprived of social status, in part by
describing who is depriving them of it: that is, the narrative is ultimately
designed to scapegoat people, either specific individuals who represent a
larger target group or the target group itself. It does this by ultimately
depicting those targets as both demonic and a source of pollution, people fit
only for elimination.
“This is one of the paradoxical aspects of conspiracy theories—that they
give people a sense of control by nominating these dark forces that are
dominating their lives,” says Lewandowsky. “So there is this sort of ironic
blip in the entire psychology of it to begin with, which is that of regaining
control by blaming it on dark forces that are uncontrollable. It’s that sort of
paradoxical thing. Then there’s other literature showing that, for example,
having an enemy is chicken soup for the soul, makes people feel better to
have an enemy, bizarrely—under certain circumstances when they’re
feeling threatened.”18
At its roots, it’s about power: who has it and who doesn’t.
“It should be no surprise that feelings of power are relevant to beliefs in
conspiracy theories,” explain Wood and Douglas. “On a very basic level,
con spiracy theories are basically stories about power—the secret power of
a particu lar group, and the new power of the people who have come to see
through their deception. People who feel relatively powerless are more
likely to agree with conspiracy theories, and general conspiracy mentality
predicts prejudice against high-power but not low-power groups.”19
In the end, as Brotherton puts it, “the prototypical conspiracy theory is
an unanswered question; it assumes nothing is as it seems; it portrays the
con spirators as preternaturally competent; and as unusually evil; it is
founded on anomaly hunting; and it is ultimately irrefutable.”20
Meanwhile, the prototypical person drawn to them is, typically,
someone who feels keenly the kind of powerlessness common to modern
life and is angry about it. As Vox writer Sean Illing puts it: “I think of
conspiracy theorists as people who have rejected a world they don’t fit into,
and the theories them selves offer a way to make sense of it and invert the
cause of the problem. In other words, if I’m unhappy or alienated, it’s not
my fault; it’s these shadowy forces that are aligned against me. Plus, it gives
the conspiracy theorist a sense of power—they understand what’s really
going on in a way no one else does.”21
________
After a while, you start to notice that your friends and family and people
you know in real life have decided not to join you down inside the maze.
That’s their loss, right? They’re just normies. But soon it feels like your
only friends in the world are the friends you meet in the conspiracy
world.
At first, you’re eager to share your newfound insight with your real-
life friends. Then you stop when they start responding coldly and
sometimes harshly. You get into arguments with family members.
Old friends unfriend you, both in real life and on the Internet.
Relatives chastise you as stupid and gullible. Sometimes people you’ve
known for decades attack you on Facebook for buying into conspiracist
ideas. Social circles in which you used to run comfortably now feel
awkward, and invitations are fewer.
You’re confident that someday you’ll be vindicated, that all the so-
called friends and family who turned their backs on you will come
crawling apologetically when the truth comes down. That becomes a kind
of comfort even as your relationships with those people shrivel to polite
hellos or perhaps even rancorous arguments.
It’s OK, because the people in the conspiracy’s community of true
believers are there for you. They’re your friends, and they reassure you
that those schmucks who claimed they loved you really just wanted to
control your mind and your life and you’re better off without them.
You don’t vote or participate in party politics anymore unless it has a
conspiracist appeal. Democracy is a joke, you realize. All those dark,
nefarious forces control too much, have rendered the entire political
establishment a fraud and a waste. The sheeple, the people who think
their votes and their efforts matter, spend their time on that stuff. You
know better.
You don’t watch the regular news anymore, certainly not the
corporate-owned entities at “fake news” joints like CNN and MSNBC; at
most, you’ll watch some Fox News, though even that has become a bit
too mainstream for your tastes. You’re consuming lots of information,
though, maybe more than you ever have—it’s just from sources like
Infowars, the Michael Savage show, various YouTube channels that
specialize in conspiracy theories, message boards at places like 4chan,
8chan, and Reddit, or even video game chat rooms on platforms that
come with the games.
It’s very reassuring, and it still feels empowering, because you realize
that you have become part of a much bigger community, a global
community, one that contains a wealth of knowledge and insights and
that layers more conspiracy theories to your own personal onion.
Then, even as the isolation in your real life sets in, you begin to have
doubts—not about the theory, but about some of your fellow
conspiracists. Always on the lookout for being taken advantage of, you
start feeling that they are giving you reasons not to trust them. It creeps
in.
________
________
________
Sometimes, the feuding breaks out on the surface, among the leading
conspiracists: Noted “alt-lite” figures Jack Posobiec and Laura Loomer, in
the summer of 2018, argued about who deserved credit for the conspiracy
theory they both promoted that Stephen Paddock, the Las Vegas shooter,
actually had secret ties to Islamic State. Loomer had in fact first promoted
this absurdly baseless claim that members of Congress had been briefed on
“ISIS ties” to the shooting.
“I just thought it was really shady how Jack calls himself my friend, but
then he won’t give me credit for my work,” Loomer said.33
However, Loomer herself picked up the story from a group called
Americans for Intelligence Reform, who claimed that an Australian man
who also stayed at the Mandalay Bay resort that evening was somehow
mysteriously connected to it all, and this man had not-altogether-clear
connections to Islamic State. In the modern age of evidence-free conspiracy
theories, this thin gruel was enough to fuel speculation for a week or so.
There have been other feuds, involving different dynamics: popular
pod-caster Joe Rogan and Alex Jones quarreled over the Sandy Hook
conspiracy theories, which Rogan found embarrassing. Roger Stone, the
onetime Donald Trump aide, and conspiracy-meister Jerome Corsi, who at
one time were bosom allies, broke into a vicious feud over their respective
roles in the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election led
by Robert Mueller, in which they both were witnesses.34
However, most of the real internecine warring within the world of
conspiracy theories takes place on the Internet among the various would-be
participants, researchers, and self-proclaimed “investigators” and “citizen
journalists.” It also occurs vividly among the conspiracy-fueled street-
fighting organizations like the Proud Boys and their various cousins.
One of the more prolific such groups, in terms of organizing street
protests that are designed to devolve into mass brawls and riots, is Patriot
Prayer, an outfit based in Vancouver, Washington, across the Columbia
River from Portland, Oregon, a city whose small but established population
of anarchists and antifascists is the target of the events. Although Patriot
Prayer founder Joey Gibson—himself a mixed-race Japanese American—
occasionally denounced white supremacists, his events regularly attracted
significant numbers of skinheads, white nationalists, and neo-Nazis, in
addition to the Patriot/militia bikers that formed the group’s original core.35
This created tensions within the group, many of whose members were
just fine with the presence of bigots, whereas others loudly denounced
them. Moreover, the Oregon chapter of the Proud Boys were among Patriot
Prayer’s sturdiest supporters and, in fact, formed its largest and most violent
street-fighting faction. Gibson’s right-hand man, a hulking Samoan named
Tusitala “Tiny” Toese, was certainly the most prominent of these Proud
Boys, as well as one of its most prolific brawlers, resulting in numerous
arrests and, eventually, a police investigation.
During the winter of 2018–2019, however, Patriot Prayer and the Proud
Boys started feuding, likely because the inclement Northwest weather
dampened enthusiasm for the street events. It devolved into a cesspit of
internal squabbling, accompanied by fever-pitched talk of committing
violence, some of it directed at one another.
This cluster of far-right activists, mostly based in the exurban and
suburban areas around Vancouver, had been ratcheting up the violence
inherent in their rhetoric for the previous year and a half, beginning with a
rally that drew a massive counterprotest shortly after an alt-right figure who
had attended Patriot Prayer events stabbed two men to death on a Portland
commuter train.36 That was followed by Gibson-organized events that
turned into massive brawls in Olympia and Seattle, Washington, and in San
Francisco and Berkeley, California.37
They also favored violent conspiracist rhetoric. Gibson regularly wore
an Infowars shirt to his events. Gibson and Tiny Toese both sported
“Pinochet Did Nothing Wrong” shirts sold by the Proud Boys, featuring
graphics showing people being pitched out of helicopters, at events the
summer of 2018. And both talked increasingly about the need to “step
things up” on the Facebook videos they liked to post. Even before a June
30, 2018, event that turned into a riot, Patriot Prayer had been vowing to
“cleanse” the streets of Portland.38
In the meantime, Toese went on a far-right podcast and explained that
he didn’t really have any problems with white supremacists. “I don’t give a
fuck if real racists come to the rallies, real alt-right,” he said. “We’ve been
trying to beat these people up for a long time; it ain’t gonna work. The only
thing that we can do to solve this whole fucking problem with Nazis and all
this shit is to have a civil conversation. And both sides understanding what
the other side wants.”39
It’s not clear what precipitated Toese’s falling-out with Patriot Prayer,
but it appeared to revolve around Haley Adams, a young blonde who had
been an increasingly visible presence at the organization’s events during the
previous year. Social media conversations suggested that Adams may have
been planning to “dox” some of the Proud Boy participants, which led
Toese, who had become increasingly loyal to the Proud Boys over the same
period, to denounce Adams. According to one account, Adams had actually
been denounced by Proud Boys “elders.”
In response, Adams’s most fervent defenders in Patriot Prayer took to
social media to make the split with Proud Boys clear and unequivocal.
“Haley Adams has my full approval to say whatever she wants to say,” a
man named Russell Schultz said in his video. “If the Proud Boys want to
attack her, that just tells me they are getting triggered and beat by a little
girl.”
Calling the Proud Boys “beta,” Schultz went on to promise he would
“kill” any Proud Boys who wanted to fight him over the dispute. “This shit
cannot happen,” he said. “You are a psycho; you need to get out of the
fucking movement. If you’re afraid of being doxxed, get out of the fucking
movement; you don’t need to be here; you’re a cancer. You have a problem
with me, want to come at me, I’m gonna fucking waste you. You have no
chance against me. I may even come looking for you one day.”40
________
Now you no longer know who to trust. Your fellow “independent
thinkers” have proven to be untrustworthy. You feel more alone than
ever.
Turning back to your family and friends is out of the question.
They’ve already betrayed you. You can envision the gloating looks on
their faces if you try turning back to them. That’s not an option.
So you just go it alone. A lot of people quit their jobs and get work
where they don’t have to be in touch with normies because they can’t
stand trying to fake their utter contempt for these people. It’s not that
hard to do in the Internet age; you can work out of your home.
Other people move to remote, rural places where their contact with
other people is even further minimized. They don’t mind. They are going
to be laughing when the shit hits the fan and the end of the world comes
and everyone else is unprepared.
You won’t be, even if you have to go it completely alone. A lone
wolf, that’s what you are.
________
CHAOS BY DESIGN
What’s on the menu? When it comes to everyone’s social media diet, there’s
one constant you can count on: misinformation.
It’s built into the system. Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci explained it
succinctly in her TED talk:1
As Internet companies like YouTube and Facebook have struggled with the
deluge of far-right extremism, racial bigotry, and conspiracy theories that
have filled their platforms, it’s becoming increasingly clear that there’s one
very simple and yet insurmountable reason they haven’t been able to get it
under control: their revenue streams are built around attracting such
content.3
YouTube executives, as a Bloomberg News piece exposed in early
2019, have remained lackadaisical about the problem over the years that it
has accumulated. “Scores of people inside YouTube and Google, its owner,
raised concerns about the mass of false, incendiary and toxic content that
the world’s largest video site surfaced and spread,” Peter Bergen reported.
“Each time they got the same basic response: Don’t rock the boat.”4
Getting these platforms to clamp down on speech that helps fuel racial
violence—notably including conspiracy-theorist content that scapegoats
targeted minorities—is made more difficult both by the traffic-boosting
incentives in place to permit it to continue, as well as by the ease with
which targeted offenders can escape their wrath and continue to post
content.
The conspiratorial mindset is threaded throughout the social fabric of
YouTube. It’s part of the warp and weft of its production economy.
“YouTube offers infinite opportunities to create a closed ecosystem, an
opaque algorithm, and the chance for a very small number of people to
make a very large amount of money,” observes Alexis Madrigal, deputy
editor of the Atlantic. “While these conditions of production—which
incentivize content creation at a very low cost to YouTube—exist on other
modern social platforms, YouTube’s particular constellation of them is
special. It’s why conspiracy videos get purchase on the site, and why they
will be very hard to uproot.”5
No one is more emblematic of that problem than conspiracy-meister
Alex Jones of Infowars, who was officially banned from YouTube and
Facebook in August 2018. Even though Jones had a long and horrific track
record with his videos, the lawsuit filed by the parents of Sandy Hook
victims plagued by Infowars followers made clear the potential liability that
every platform that hosted his work faced.6
Jones has not disappeared easily, however. His Infowars content has
been reposted by a number of mirror sites that eventually have been
removed—one as recently as just after the attacks in Christchurch. In spite
of this, Media Matters notes: “Channels that violate YouTube’s rules by
exclusively sharing Infowars content are easily found on YouTube, but the
video platform doesn’t appear to be devoting many resources to enforcing
its own rules.”7
Indeed, YouTube very nearly installed a remuneration system for its
video creators in 2017 that would have made Jones the site’s highest-paid
contributor and only changed course after its platform was linked to various
acts of violence.
The top priority at YouTube is “engagement”: getting people to come to
the site and remain there, accumulated in data as views, time spent viewing,
and interactions. Moderating extremist content is often devalued if it
interferes with the company’s main goals. The key for gauging engagement
is a metric the algorithm designers call “watch time”—that is, the amount of
time you spend consuming media on the site.
Becca Lewis, a researcher with the technology research nonprofit Data
& Society, warns that this fixation on watch time can be either banal or
dangerous. “In terms of YouTube’s business model and attempts to keep
users engaged on their content, it makes sense what we’re seeing the
algorithms do,” Lewis said. “That algorithmic behavior is great if you’re
looking for makeup artists and you watch one person’s content and want a
bunch of other people’s advice on how to do your eye shadow. But it
becomes a lot more problematic when you’re talking about political and
extremist content.”8
The company announced early in 2019 that it intended to crack down on
the conspiracism. However, part of its problem is that YouTube in fact
created a huge market for these crackpot and often harmful theories by
unleashing an unprecedented boom in conspiracism. That same market is
where it now makes its living.
The formula for success that emerged over time at YouTube is simple:
“Outrage equals attention.” Brittan Heller, a fellow at Harvard University’s
Carr Center, observed that it’s also ripe for exploitation by political
extremists and hucksters. “They don’t know how the algorithm works,” she
said. “But they do know that the more outrageous the content is, the more
views.”9
And the more views, the more money these platforms—not just
YouTube, but Google and Facebook and Twitter and Instagram—roll in.
Hate and division become the fuel for profit in this system.
Information scientist Safiya Umoja Noble observes that “the neoliberal
political and economic environment has profited tremendously from
misinformation and mischaracterization of communities, with a range of
consequences for the most disenfranchised and marginalized among us.”
She has particularly zeroed in on the way that search engines have bolstered
white nationalist and similarly extremist ideas through their “algorithms of
oppression”: “Search results, in the context of commercial advertising
companies, lay the groundwork . . . for implicit bias: bias that is buttressed
by advertising profits.”10
Algorithms not only are designed to reinforce racial stereotypes and
narratives, they actually help encourage people to be radicalized by
extremist political ideologies—particularly white nationalism.
________
________
Sometimes the people who fall down the rabbit holes and are recruited into
communities organized around conspiracy theories would have ended up in
a similar situation regardless. But people are also being actively recruited
for a combination of political, ideological, and financial/economic
motivations. And they are being actively deceived.
“We are all targets of disinformation, meant to erode our trust in
democracy and divide us,” warns University of Washington information
scientist Kate Starbird.22
She came to this stark conclusion while conducting a study at the
University of Washington involving the evolution of the discussion about
the Black Lives Matter movement on social media—and found herself
walking into the unexpected realization, supported both by data and a raft of
real-world evidence, that the whole discussion was being manipulated, and
not for the better. The more the team examined the evidence, the clearer it
became that this manipulation was intended to fuel internal social strife
among the American public.23
The study quickly morphed into a scientific examination of
disinformation—that is, information that’s intended to confuse and distort,
whether accurate or not—which exists on all sides of the political
spectrum.24 One of their key studies focused on Twitter to see how bad
information immediately follows major crisis-type events such as mass
shootings and how those rumors “muddy the waters” around the event, even
for people who were physically present, and in particular how such rumors
can permanently alter the public’s perception of the event itself and its
causes.
Consider exhibit A: the nearly instantaneous claims by Alex Jones and
other conspiracy theorists that the Las Vegas mass shooting of October 1,
2017, was a false flag event and the ensuing swirl of confusion around it,
which eventually permanently obscured the public’s understanding that the
man who perpetrated it was unhinged and at least partially motivated by far-
right conspiracy theories about guns. Police investigators avoided the
evidence that this had been the case as well.
The chief reason we perceive stories, whether real or not, as “true”
depends in large part on our unconscious cognitive biases, Starbird says—
that is, when our preexisting beliefs are confirmed along the way. We’ve
seen how these biases can be targeted by technology companies. Well-
equipped political organizations can manipulate disinformation in much the
same way.
“If it makes you feel outraged against the other side, probably someone
is manipulating you,” she warns.25
The main wellspring of the disinformation Starbird dealt with in her
study was Russia and its “troll farms” that introduced industrial-strength
data pollution into the American discourse via social media during the 2016
election campaign and afterward. However, she says that the disinformation
can be, and often is, run by anyone sophisticated enough to understand its
essential principles. These include white nationalists, a number of
conspiracy-oriented campaigns involving vaccines and other health-related
conspiracies, and in recent years, QAnon.
The strategy, she says, is not just consistent, but frighteningly
sophisticated and nuanced. “One of these goals is to ‘sow division,’ to put
pressure on the fault lines in our society,” she explained in her findings. “A
divided society that turns against itself, that cannot come together and find
common ground, is one that is easily manipulated. . . . Russian agents did
not create political division in the United States, but they were working to
encourage it.”26
These outside organizational entities make full use of a preexisting
media ecosystem featuring “news” outlets that claim to be “fair” and
“independent,” but which are in fact only propaganda organizations, nearly
all of them right-wing. As Starbird explained in one of her studies:
________
________
Getting red-pilled actually means a lot of different things to the people who
claim it, though it generally refers to embracing any of a number of
conspiracy theories and absorbing the conspiracist worldview—which can
often morph into something even more radical very quickly.
A large collection of group chats among explicitly fascist ideologues
and organizers was analyzed by the open-source journalism site Bellingcat,
which examined the process by which recruits became increasingly
radicalized and absorbed into the belief system.44
It found that most agree that the key is acknowledgment of the Jewish
question, or JQ; that is, whether or not Jewish people are at the center of a
vast global conspiracy, the end goal of which is usually “white genocide.”
The participants in the chats described red-pilling as a gradual process, but
the end point seemed to be almost uniformly alt-right white nationalism.
“Individual people can be red-pilled on certain issues and not others,”
the report noted. “Stefan Molyneux, a popular author and far-right YouTube
personality, is seen as being red-pilled on race and ‘the future of the west’
even though he is not considered as a fascist. Prominent YouTuber
PewDiePie is also often considered red-pilled. It is accepted that media
personalities need to hide their outright fascist beliefs, or ‘power level,’ in
order to have a chance at redpilling the general population.”45
Recruitment techniques, in fact, tend to dominate the discussions, and
disagreements often erupt over which are the most effective, though
everyone concurred that people who harbor an animus toward “social
justice warriors” (known more often by their acronym, SJWs) and “political
correctness” are prime targets. They also agree that Donald Trump is seen
as the source of redpilling for many Americans.
Males comprised the vast majority of these fascist activists—some, in
fact, doubted that women can be red-pilled at all. When women did appear
on the scene, they made their marks by being even more extreme than the
typical conspiracy theorist.
Most of them, though not all, were being radicalized online: the report
found thirty-nine of the seventy-five fascists whose chats it studied credit
the Internet as their red-pilling source, with YouTube the website most
frequently referenced. However, the report notes that “when indoctrination
begins offline new converts inevitably go online to deepen their beliefs.”46
A user named barD described his red-pilling process:
The spiral that barD described continued ratcheting up, ranging from
comment-section disputes to consuming videos from far-right YouTube
personalities to participating in the comments at “the_donald” subreddit and
4chan’s infamous white nationalist–dominated /pol/ board, eventually
concluding at fascist Discord servers.
Radicalized recruits are fond of claiming that they actually never used
to be racist at all but that an argument with an “SJW” online made them so
angry they turned to white nationalist ideology. They insist that racist
remarks they make are meant only “ironically,” rather like the OK sign.
Bellingcat found a user named FucknOathMate who, when asked if he was
“only doing it ironically at first,” replied, “Well sort of”—then added that,
before he was red-pilled, he knew Jewish people were “weird” and “ran
everything,” but he hadn’t yet become a Holocaust denier or a fascist as he
was now.48
Conspiracy theories, particularly those peddled by Alex Jones, Paul
Joseph Watson, and their multimedia Infowars operation, also played a key
role in the “red-pilling” process for many of the people Bellingcat identified
as dedicated fascists.
“Conspiracy theories appear to be one of the more well-trodden roads
into fascist nationalism,” it reported. A key example was provided by a
Discord user using the nom de plume Harleen Kekzel, who claimed to have
identified at the age of sixteen as a “polyamorous genderqueer masculine
leaning pansexual” and that Alex Jones started her on the journey to
becoming “red-pilled”—or rather that she “was conspiracy pilled” along
with her husband.49
However, for all his usefulness, Jones and Infowars actually are viewed
with considerable skepticism by many serious fascists who dismiss them as
“controlled opposition.” Jones, who denounced David Duke after having
him on his program, is generally viewed as too compromised and too
milquetoast for serious National Socialists—as are other right-wing pundits
with a conspiracist bent, such as Michael Savage and David Horowitz, both
of whom are Jewish.
The most striking and powerful pathway to radicalization for these
young fascists, however, was YouTube.
“Fascists who become red-pilled through YouTube often start with
comparatively less extreme right-wing personalities, like Ben Shapiro or
Milo Yiannopolous,” Bellingcat reported. “One user explained that he was a
‘moderate republican’ before ‘Steven Crowder, Paul Joseph Watson, Milo
Yiannopolous, Black Pidgeon Speaks,’ and other far-right YouTubers
slowly red-pilled him. Over time he ‘moved further and further right until
[he] could no longer stand them. That’s why [he likes] those groups even
still, because if we just had the Fascists, we’d never convert anyone.’”50
The serious fascists, however, view the alt-right as having something of
an image problem, particularly in how it appropriates mainstream cartoon
and humor imagery, like Pepe the Frog, who is widely recognized as the alt-
right’s chief mascot. “Fascist activists view the alt-right as silly, but also as
a crucial recruiting ground,” noted Bellingcat.51
And it doesn’t get much sillier—or stranger and ultimately disturbingly
toxic—than the Church of Kek.
________
You may have seen the name bandied about on social media, especially in
political circles where alt-right activists and avid Donald Trump supporters
lurk. Usually it is brandished as a kind of epithet, seemingly to ward off the
effects of liberal arguments, and it often is conveyed in memes that use the
image of the alt-right mascot, Pepe the Frog: “Kek!”52
Kek, in the alt-right’s telling, is the “deity” of the semi-ironic “religion”
the white nationalist movement has created for itself online—partly for
amusement, as a way to troll liberals and self-righteous conservatives both,
and partly to make a kind of political point. He is a god of chaos and
darkness, with the head of a frog, and the source of the alt-right’s memetic
“magic,” to whom white nationalists and Donald Trump alike owe their
success, according to their own explanations.
In many ways, Kek is the apotheosis of the bizarre alternative reality of
the alt-right: at once absurdly juvenile, transgressive, and racist, Kek also
reflects a deeper, pseudo-intellectual purpose that appeals to young
ideologues who fancy themselves deep thinkers. It dwells in that murky
area they often occupy, between satire, irony, mockery, and serious
ideology; Kek can be both a big joke on liberals and a reflection of the alt-
right’s own self-image as serious agents of chaos in modern society.
Most of all, Kek has become a kind of tribal marker of the alt-right: its
meaning obscure and unavailable to “normies,” referencing Kek is most
often a way of signaling to fellow conversants online that the writer
embraces the principles of chaos and destruction that are central to alt-right
thinking. Many of them like to think of it as a harmless 4chan meme—
though in the end, there really is nothing harmless about it.
The name, usage, and ultimately the ideas around it originated in
gaming culture, particularly on chat boards devoted to the World of
Warcraft online computer games, according to Know Your Meme.53 In those
games, participants can chat only with members of their own faction in the
“war” (either Alliance or Horde fighters), while opposing players’ chats are
rendered in a cryptic form based on Korean; thus, the common chat phrase
“LOL” (laugh out loud) was read by opposing players as “KEK.” The
phrase caught on as a variation on “LOL” in game chat rooms, as well as at
open forums dedicated to gaming, animation, and popular culture, places
such as 4chan and Reddit—also dens of the alt-right, where the Pepe the
Frog meme (originally an apolitical cartoon frog created by a liberal named
Matt Furie) also has its origins and similarly was hijacked as a symbol of
white nationalism.
At some point, someone at 4chan happened to seize on a coincidence:
there was, in fact, an Egyptian god named Kek. An androgynous god who
could take either male or female form, Kek originally was depicted in
female form as possessing the head of a frog or a cat and when male, a
serpent, though during the Greco-Roman period, the male form was
depicted as a frog-headed man.
More importantly, Kek was portrayed as a bringer of chaos and
darkness, which happened to fit perfectly with the alt-right’s self-image of
being primarily devoted to destroying the existing world order.
In the fertile imaginations at play on 4chan’s image boards and other
alt-right gathering spaces, this coincidence took on a life of its own, leading
to wide-ranging speculation that Pepe—who, by then, had not only become
closely associated with the alt-right, but also with the candidacy of Donald
Trump—was actually the living embodiment of Kek. And so the Cult of
Kek was born.
Constructed to reflect alt-right politics, the online acolytes of the
“religion” in short order constructed a whole panoply of artifacts of the
satirical church, including a detailed theology, discussions about creating
“meme magick,” books and audiotapes, and even a common prayer:
It is the Kek the Bodhisattva who can teach our people these
truths, if we are willing to listen and to commit ourselves to
the generation of meme magick through karmic morality and
through the mantra of memes. By refusing to cuck and by
rejecting the foul mindsets of our invaders and terrorizers,
we will move the nation away from its suffering under the
pains of hostile occupation, and closer and closer to its final
rebirth. If instead, our people cuck and adopt the foul
mindsets, they will generate not Aryan karma but further
mosaic samsara.
The trve power of skillful memes is to meme the karmic
nation into reality, the process of meme magick. By
spreading and repeating the meme mantra, it is possible to
generate the karma needed for the rebirth of the nation.56
These three clusters interact in myriad ways and produce a long list of
identifiable traits. Altemeyer in particular has identified about a dozen such
traits.
Such people are highly ethnocentric, inclined to see the world as their
in-group versus everyone else.
They are highly fearful of a dangerous world.
They are highly self-righteous.
They are aggressive.
They are highly prejudiced against racial and ethnic majorities, non-
heterosexuals, and women in general.
Their beliefs are a mass of contradictions dependent on
compartmentalized thinking.
They reason poorly, and they are prone to projection.
They are highly dogmatic.
They are dependent on social reinforcement of their beliefs.
Because they severely limit their exposure to different people and
ideas, they vastly overestimate the extent to which other people agree
with them.
They are prone to conspiracist thinking and a gullibility about
“alternative facts.”6
________
While the rest of the world mourned the fifty lives lost in the March 15,
2019, attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, the far right
and its trolls were celebrating. From Breitbart News to Infowars to the
sewers of 4chan, 8chan, and the Daily Stormer, extremists were
unequivocal in reveling in the massacre.9
“This is a good start,” wrote one commenter at Breitbart, beneath a
headlined story detailing the mass murders. “That man is a goddam hero,”
wrote another, as E. J. Gibney documented on Twitter. “[A] real feel good
story!” added yet another.
Someone writing as “White Pride” chimed in: “payback is a bitch! Gun
control and bans are futile!!! He is giving them another taste of their own
medicine by fighting fire with fire! An eye for an eye, Tit for Tat, quid pro
quo!!!”
“Armed Infidel” chimed in: “The rag heads could easily avoid this by
not infesting the rest of the world with their presence.” Another commenter
added: “I’ve thought about it and decided. . . . I don’t care. It’s not as
though there was any humans involved.”
Stewart Rhodes, leader of the neo-militia organization Oath Keepers,
went on Alex Jones’s Infowars program and told listeners that the terrorist’s
motives were legitimate:
________
________
This plays a key role in how violence created by a tide of young men
radicalized online by far-right ideologues and conspiracy theories is spread.
Having a figure like Trump both normalizing their extremism and
encouraging violence in support of it means that it is being spread
throughout American society.
The way this finds expression is with men like Cesar Sayoc, who see
themselves as “warriors” in a larger fight against evil itself, which in their
view is embodied by liberals and leftists. This is why so many right-wing
Trump supporters speak so eagerly of launching a “civil war” against urban
liberals.24
Trump himself indulges in this “warrior” mentality. A 2017 New York
Times piece explained Trump’s worldview somewhat nonchalantly in an
article exploring why the president attacked NFL players:
In private, the president and his top aides freely admit that he
is engaged in a culture war on behalf of his white, working-
class base, a New York billionaire waging war against
“politically correct” coastal elites on behalf of his supporters
in the South and in the Midwest. He believes the war was
foisted upon him by former President Barack Obama and
other Democrats—and he is determined to win, current and
former aides said.25
________
________
________
In the end, the question everyone should ask themselves is: what happens if
I take this red pill?
It promises being awakened to “the way things really are,” like in The
Matrix. Except . . . The Matrix is fiction. And so is any “red-pilled” version
of reality comprised of the thin gruel of conspiracy theories and conjecture:
fictions, when examined with any rigor, created by a cluster of self-
described “antiglobalists” whose concocted universe becomes a conduit for
white nationalist extremism.
People who sell the “red pill”—usually desperate for fellows in the
increasingly isolated worlds they inhabit—want you to believe that you are
freeing yourself from a worldview created by a nefarious cabal of Jewish
scholars or perhaps moneygrubbing bankers, something along the
traditional lines.
What they’re not telling you is that when you take it, you are submitting
yourself wholly to a universe created by a weird agglomeration of paranoid
personalities and white nationalist bigots. They don’t tell you that, once you
swallow the pill and are inside the universe, there really isn’t any dissent
regarding what is real or not. And what is real is what the leading voices of
the theories—Alex Jones, or Q, or the alpha dogs of the online communities
where conspiracies and “evidence” are produced and regurgitated endlessly
—tell everyone it is. It’s a reality constructed and ordered by people
claiming that reality is constructed and ordered by someone else: an endless
hall of mirrors.
And if you’ve taken it, it’s worth wondering what you’ve done to
yourself. Eventually your example—depending on how far along the
narrative arc you are—will stand as a warning to anyone considering
swallowing the red pill.
Sure, at first it was empowering and exciting. It was more than an
adrenaline rush—it became positively addictive, especially a participatory
conspiracy theory like QAnon. But as time wore on, the seamy side of this
world—the scams, the easy and loose relation with facts, the willingness to
backstab—began to wear thin.
Pretty soon, you’re isolated. Your family won’t talk with you, and your
old friendships have mostly died away. You’re alienated from your
colleagues, and you don’t know whom to trust. Even your neighbors are
suspects. The only friends you have are people inside the “red-pilled”
world, and as time wears on, there are increasing problems with them, too.
If you go to a traditional or even evangelical church, you eventually find
that you can no longer trust them, either.
You no longer vote; you no longer participate in the political process at
all, because you’ve come to believe democracy is a joke. So you also have
zero political power. After a while the isolation and frustration and anger
become intense.
That’s what red-pilling actually does: it promises freedom, and it
eventually binds you in cords that creep around you in your sleep.
So let’s consider a blue pill: an antidote to this bizarre epistemological
pill promising to awaken you but that actually puts you to sleep. A pill that
would honestly awaken people to an embrace of traditional reality and
normative versions of factuality and reason.
What would that look like?
Chapter 9
________
Fifteen Steps
3. Your relationship with the person is what will guide them out of the
rabbit hole.
If your goal is to help another person emerge from the conspiracist cocoon
through the gravitational pull of your relationship, then large doses of
empathy and forbearance will be required on your part. This is always much
easier said than done, especially because red-pilled people are so often
angry, contentious, suspicious, and generally cantankerous.
Samantha Kutner says that avoiding a really confrontational approach is
key. She describes her sessions as “more of a respectful listening. Being
willing to listen to them.” She says she studied psychologist Carl Rogers’s
“nondirective approaches” to interviewing subjects, which helped her
tremendously.
Maintaining this empathetic approach, however, should never mean
sacrificing the boundaries of fundamental human behavior—violence and
threats are always intolerable, whether directed at you or anyone else. And
you should never sacrifice those boundaries for the sake of maintaining the
relationship.
As journalist Noah Berlatsky has observed, empathy as a simple
principle is a two-edged sword that can make the world better, but it can be
used to make things worse. “The problems with empathy bias are
compounded by the fact that it’s possible to weaponize empathy to create
support for ugly political programs, and even for violence,” he writes.
“Trump leverages our empathy bias by presenting himself as the
spokesperson for good, normal, white people against untrustworthy,
dangerous, racial others. When he talks about immigrants, for example,
Trump constantly aligns himself with those he claims are victims of
immigrants. He focuses on the people who will supposedly suffer when
immigrants take jobs or commit crimes.”11
Paul Bloom, a psychology professor at Yale University, argues for a
different model of empathetic behavior he calls “rational compassion,”
which mitigates and redirects the claims of empathy. Trump’s calls for
empathy for victims of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants, he
suggests, should elicit a search for data. “You don’t have to be a cold-
blooded utilitarian,” Bloom says, “but people should appreciate that facts
matter. If Trump says or implies that an extraordinary number of illegal
immigrants are murderers and rapists, before you start putting yourself in
people’s shoes and feeling their pain, you should ask, is it true?”
C. V. Vitolo says she has grappled with how different people’s grasps of
the world can really be. She emphasizes “just the importance of holding
another person’s epistemology and of understanding a lot of this as
epistemological problems, where it’s not just that they don’t understand the
data or they don’t understand what the science says.
“Sometimes it’s not a question of, ‘Could you, in theory, separate
people into races biologically?’ Sure, you can separate people into any
number of things biologically if you wanted to. You could do it twenty
different ways. You can do whatever you want. But it’s essential to
understand: why sort people this way in the first place, right? They often
invert the scientific process. What is driving the mode of scientific inquiry
that you’re participating in?”
6. Don’t fall down the rabbit hole yourself while attempting to help
someone else out of it.
One of the first things that those who are attempting to draw someone out
of the red-pill rabbit hole have to do is immunize themselves from the
attractions of conspiracism. So at every step in your process of listening to
and discussing a red-pilled person’s beliefs, it’s essential to keep in mind
the distinction made in chapter 1 between conspiracies and conspiracy
theories—namely, the three primary limitations of real conspiracies
(duration, numbers of actors, scope, and breadth) and the known attributes
of conspiracy theories (the long period of time over which they occurs, their
large numbers of participants, and the global reach of the plots).
Stephan Lewandowsky says he’s frequently criticized by people asking
how he can dismiss the theories when in fact there have been real
conspiracies. His answer: “If you look at true conspiracies that we now
acknowledge have happened—like the Volkswagen diesel scandal [in which
the carmaker was caught falsifying emissions data on its cars], which is
classic conspiracy, right? That was uncovered by very conventional means.
That wasn’t cranks who invented this and then found it confirmed. No,
these were professionals that noticed some weird stuff and they investigated
that. And the same is true for Iran Contra, true for Watergate,
COINTELPRO.”
As he observes, there’s never been a real conspiracy uncovered by a
conspiracy theorist.
“The important thing . . . is [that] the cognition of the people who
uncovered these true conspiracies is usually totally straightforward,” he
adds. “I mean, they’re not cranks—they are investigative journalists or
they’re whistleblowers or they’re academics or journalists. They’re
completely mainstream people whose job it is to go after the evidence. And
in contrast to that, the people who believe that NASA faked the moon
landing, if you look at how they considered the evidence, you can just
identify all these cognitive flaws. So true conspiracies exist, yes—but if you
think like a crank, you’ll never find a true conspiracy.”
A shorthand version of this, he acknowledges, is that much of the
conspiracy theories he sees are readily discarded when the people pitching
them have extensive records of promulgating misinformation, falsehoods,
and nonsense: “Often, I’m very skeptical simply because the people
involved make no sense.”
Those are the most essential and simple guides. It’s also wise never to
become cavalier about conspiracy theories and treat them as mere mental
games, diversions, or entertainments.
“In many ways there is nothing harmless about conspiracy theories,”
observes Lewandowsky. “I think it used to be the case that people cavalierly
just dismiss them as being a fringe phenomenon, and they were some weird
people out there who believe that Elvis was still alive in North Korea.
People were amused by it and would go, ‘Aha, yeah, isn’t that funny?’
“And perhaps that was appropriate at the time before the Internet came
along and gave them a mushrooming platform and before they were
recognized. I think what we’re experiencing now is that conspiracy theory
has been increasingly conducive to political extremism, and of course in a
sense that is nothing new, because the history of anti-Semitism is basically
just one big weaponized conspiracy theory. So in that sense, there is nothing
new under the sun; it is simply that we now have broader dissemination of
this. It’s much, much easier to spread this stuff, and I don’t think they’re
harmless.”
Kate Starbird warns that the newer conspiratorial appeals are
increasingly sophisticated and capable of ensnaring even well-educated
people. “I can see the rhetoric of critical thinking is used constantly within
the conspiracy theory ecosystems that we study,” she says. “They’ve
manipulated the tools of critical thinking, and they use it to take apart
reality, and in ways that are not healthy for society.
“So how do we give people the tools not to take everything apart, but to
learn how to build back some sense of what we can trust, and not to be
skeptical of everything, but to figure out what we should assign credibility
to? In terms of the next generation of digital literacy, or just information
literacy, I think that’s going to be really important for us, to figure out how
to trust things.”
Lewandowsky observes that for conspiracists, “the targets are almost
arbitrary. It’s just a matter of finding somebody you can hate. Doesn’t
matter if they’re gay or Jewish or Muslim or whatever, it’s just fulfilling the
same function, which is to give people somebody to hate, because they’re
being disenfranchised or disgruntled with their own lives and then
somebody comes along and tells them that it’s all the fault of the Jews or
Muslims or whatever and then, aha! All of a sudden they no longer have to
take responsibility for their own actions or they can blame somebody for
whatever misery they are experiencing and then some people will just go
boom.”
The very personal needs and motives that fuel most conspiracists’ attraction
to them are not easily generalized—sometimes they arise from individual
traumas, sometimes from idiosyncratic upbringings, or their own personal
wiring, and they are often related to the nuances of the widely varying
material realities of their daily lives.
However, there are threads that also run through conspiracism and the
authoritarian personalities drawn to them that often surface with deeper
questioning. A common theme that comes out is the heroic ideal: many if
not most red-pilled conspiracists see themselves as part of a heroic effort to
save whatever is the focus of that person’s motives: their families, their
communities, their region, their nation, their entire race (“my people” is
how they usually express the latter), sometimes all of the above.
This heroic self-conception is common among right-wing extremists in
part because they often have personal stories that are not so heroic, and
announcing their heroism is a means of overcoming that past. It also
becomes a useful rationalization for a wide range of behaviors, from
believing palpable nonsense to committing hate crimes.
Indeed, it’s something they share with hate crime perpetrators. A
number of psychological studies of such criminals has found that nearly
every one of them believed they were committing a “message” crime on
behalf of their community and in its defense, believing the mere presence of
the target minority posed a threat of some kind to it. Hate criminals and
domestic terrorists both cast themselves in a heroic light. It’s central to their
self-rationalization for their acts.
Lewandowsky recalls the case of Timothy McVeigh’s accomplice in the
1995 Oklahoma City bombing, Terry Nichols. “He used to be a guy in his
mid-thirties who had not accomplished anything: he had not been able to
maintain a relationship, he had broken off his education, he wasn’t able to
maintain any jobs. By any standards, he was a bit of a loser, and he realized
it. He was very frustrated and becoming depressed about his situation,” he
recounts.
“And then at some point, he gets in touch with members in Michigan of
the Aryan Nations, and they basically changed him. He starts hanging out
with them, they embrace him, but they also give him a new philosophy,
which says to him, ‘None of this is actually your fault, it is the
government’s fault.’ And suddenly he feels very empowered and he
basically said, ‘Wow, I’ve actually been a victim. None of this has been my
fault. It’s been the government’s fault. There’s this vast conspiracy
operating against people like me. And now I’m no longer a loser; in fact,
I’m becoming a freedom fighter, I’m embracing this cause.’ And adopting
this ideology was incredibly powerful for someone like him to make sense
of his personal troubles, but also to find something that he could embrace
and work for, for the first time in his life.”
“Look at the various reasons that people are engaged in conspiracy
ideation and conspiratorial cultures,” Michael Caulfield explains. “One of
the big ones, of course, is it’s really easy to earn intellectual respect in these
communities, right? I mean, compared to everywhere else, where it’s
actually quite expensive to earn intellectual respect.
“If you go into the flat Earth conspiracy, you can be Stephen Hawking
in five months, the Stephen Hawking of that community. So getting
intellectual respect in those communities is actually quite cheap. You
suddenly don’t have to deal with the fact that ‘Oh, I have these opinions,
but there are people smarter than me that have other opinions, so maybe my
opinions aren’t the center of the discourse universe.’”
Caulfield was struck by a mother’s tale of deradicalization in the
Washingtonian that described a woman’s struggle when her thirteen-year-
old son joined the alt-right. Angry and resentful over a false accusation of
sexual harassment, he had gravitated into online circles (particularly at
Reddit) that discussed the plot against young white men and, eventually,
“cultural Marxism.” He tried attending a Proud Boys rally.
Eventually, meeting some of his online alt-right heroes turned out to be
disillusioning, and he peeled away from the scene. Some weeks later, he
told his mother what was going through his head.
“I’d always had my doubts,” he said. “I knew liking them was wrong.
But I wanted to like them because everyone else hated them.”
She asked him whether he liked them.
“I liked them because they were adults and they thought I was an adult.
I was one of them,” he answered. “I was participating in a conversation.
They took me seriously. No one ever took me seriously—not you, not my
teachers, no one. If I expressed an opinion, you thought I was just a
dumbass kid trying to find my voice. I already had my voice.”13
Caulfield recognized this scenario: “It’s almost traditional grooming in
the sense that the big thing they had with the son is that the community, he
felt, took him seriously. And he felt that his other communities, including
his parents, didn’t. And even though that’s about a thirteen-year-old, I think
it’s also very similar to why a lot of adults gravitate to these communities.
“It’s not all just racism and threats and so forth. A lot of it is they have a
desire for some kind of stature, and they’re not going to make that stature
by saying something that everyone else is saying. And they’re not going to
get that stature in a community that consists of millions of people versus a
smaller community where they can be a quicker superstar.”
The motivating dynamics of conspiracy theorists all vary widely, but
these core motivations tend to arise out of commonly held beliefs and views
that have been distorted and misshapen by the false information and
sociopathic worldview innate to conspiracism. There are, of course, many
other ways to feel heroic and appreciated than to join extremist
organizations, and getting people to change course may require being
imaginative about finding other ways of making them feel valued.
The narratives that are the grist of these buried mythologies are usually
gut level in nature: we buy into the myth of heroism on a visceral level. But
those who do find themselves caught in an endless dynamic in which
generating, identifying, defeating, and then eliminating the enemy—which
is the essence of the heroic narrative—becomes their sole preoccupation. As
we have seen, this can have toxic and tragic consequences.
10. Keep it real and make it genuinely about helping your friend or loved
one. If the person you are attempting to rescue suspects ulterior
motives, you will be sunk.
Samantha Kutner says she works hard to make her interchanges with
radicalized Proud Boys “empowering” but in a healthy direction.
“It would come from a source of empowerment with them,” she says,
adding that groups like the Proud Boys recruit with the same idea in mind:
“I think they’re initially sold on this pitch: ‘You get a chance to be blah,
blah in this organization.’”
She offers them a different, similarly empowering narrative: “I think
that selling them on, ‘You’re an expert in yourself,’ and encouraging self-
reflexivity is key,” she says.
It’s essential, Michael Caulfield says, to gradually move the
conversations into friendlier territory without playing into the process that
led them to conspiracist beliefs in the first place. Making your relationship
with them distinct from that part of their lives is also helpful—and when
drawing them back to the real world, begin asking their advice on matters
and questions that lie wholly outside that realm.
“I think in the process of that, when it’s spotted, and when people both
understand how to not play into the whole process, I think we can have
some effect,” Caulfield says. “And the way that we have that effect is just a
simple conceptual question I would have them ask: ‘I’m not sure this is
what you think it is, but here’s something that you might be interested in.’”
Caulfield says he avoids asking: “Oh, is this trustworthy or not?” “I
actually don’t think that that’s the thing, because when you get into these
things, it’s trustworthy because it supports your thing.”
He says it’s good to challenge them on a rational level on non-core
issues, and best to challenge them on core issues when they show signs of
deepening radicalization: “When someone starts to drift this way, they’ll
post something, maybe their initial post about QAnon,” he says, “or just a
little further along,” he will attempt to steer them away, “saying, ‘Okay, my
source is better than your source, and your source sucks.’
“I think you could say, ‘Hey, I’m not sure if you realize this, but that’s
actually a known white supremacist site’—but then really quickly validate
their concern, find a piece of their concern that you can validate, and say:
‘However, your post did get me interested in some of these issues, and I
found this article from The Atlantic that makes some related points.’
“And that gives that person an out, and they are more likely to withdraw
and say, ‘Okay, some of my feelings and tension about this is not
completely invalidated, but yeah, it looks like I’ve messed up here. And I
didn’t mean to tweet out a white supremacist source.”
Still, it’s important in the process to leave room for their beliefs, even as
you’re getting them to think and behave more rationally.
“I do think that the universes there become just so encased,” he says,
“the way that it is sort of a bubble—not a bubble like it protects us from
things, but like in science fiction: a bubble universe, a little universe that is
internally consistent but exists outside of Earth Prime. They live in a bubble
universe, everything is internally consistent in there, and you can’t pull out
the Seth Rich conspiracy without it unraveling into a million different
issues.”
The sheer mass of this universe can be daunting for anyone dealing with
it. “That’s just harder because their belief system has become so plugged
into these things and so densely interconnected,” Caulfield says. “There’s
such a density to conspiratorial belief. Even more than just belief. You
would think the world is the most densely linked thing, but conspiratorial
belief is just everything links to everything.
“It’s like a game of Jenga at that point. What can you actually pull out
that’s not going to threaten this person’s central identity at this point? That’s
the much more difficult thing.”
11. Take the time to establish real-world activities with the other person
that have nothing to do with politics or conspiracies. Do things, don’t
just talk.
The human experience itself of being on the Internet and its limitations as a
form of human interaction both have a great deal to do with the spread of
conspiracism well beyond merely giving the theories a platform and a
means to circulate widely. Much of it—particularly the ugly trolling
behavior and ultimately the extremist ideologies and violent radicalism that
emerge in the worst corners—reflects the disembodied nature of that
experience and the easy dehumanization that comes along with it.
“Disembodiment and dematerialization are generally assumed to be
intrinsic consequences of digital media because of the implicit
immateriality of digital information and because the user’s interaction with
the media is estranged, or alienated, from instinctual corporeal
authenticity,” observed one study, which then explained that these were
mostly misconceptions.14
However, the otherworldly aspect of being online is part of why it’s
easy to dehumanize other people there: in our online exchanges, it’s just bits
on a screen—there’s no body nearby, no vocal intonation, no eye contact or
expression, no hand gestures, all normal parts of full human
communication. It’s easy to troll someone else. There’s even a thrill
involved.
This environment also enables conspiracism to run unchecked. The
cottage industry that produces most of the world’s conspiracy theories
competes constantly to “push the envelope” of outrage and hysteria, which
are the meat and potatoes of their existence. This means that even vile racial
bigotry comes into play—along with the whole raft of white nationalist and
other forms of extremism.
Personal relationships have difficulty swimming in this environment. So
it’s a great idea to spend shared time away from it. When undertaking the
task of deradicalizing someone, it’s ideal to meet up at least occasionally for
in-real-life activities: coffee, lunch, beers, golf, tennis, movies, pizza,
whatever. Putting a real face and person to all these bits on the screen alters
the dynamic substantially.
If you’re doing this with someone entirely online, this is much more
complicated but still possible. It mostly means agreeing to do things away
from the computer monitors, out in the real world, and then sharing those
things with the other person. You can go see movies, read books, watch TV
shows, whatever works.
Samantha Kutner likes to have a “literary component” to her exchanges
with far-right extremists. Sometimes this involves reading the same book
and discussing it. Sometimes it involves both sides keeping a journal and
then discussing them afterward.
“I’ve journaled since I was eleven, and I think that that has allowed me
to constantly be willing to evaluate my perspective and really know myself
in that way,” Kutner says. “I think that encouraging self-reflexivity and
having them read, where you’re just exposed to a multitude of different
themes, is essential to this.”
Sometimes the reading would simply entail “articles or summaries of
articles that talk about hate residuals,” she says. “It’s how your brain is
wired in a certain way after being in these organizations. Your neurons
repeatedly fire together, wire together. That’s the statement that they say.
You may be wanting to leave the group, but you may still be in that mindset
where your program or your pattern of thinking has been shaped in this way
that it’s going to take a really long time to unlearn these things.”
She focuses on helping them understand “it’s normal to experience what
they’re experiencing, and they’re not alone in it, reducing shame and
stigma, so that it’s not a process where you have to go it alone, and you can
become an expert in yourself. You can heal from your experience and
whatever it is that can take you out of it.”
Time is the ally of anyone working to draw conspiracists out of their rabbit
holes, because the more contact they have with someone whom they
previously thought of as a hapless pawn or a corporate sellout, a potential
plotter or some other stereotype used to dismiss doubters, has turned out to
be someone who values them and what they think. Eventually, this may
lead them to rethink these perceptions, though not always.
Samantha Kutner was an egghead academic when most of her subjects
met her. Initially they were hostile and skeptical but, over time, came to see
her as a friend. What worked? “I think prolonged contact with them and
showing them that I’m not an angry feminist, antifa, SJW individual, and
I’m listening to them,” she answers. “I don’t think these men were listened
to like that in their lives. I think that was a really powerful thing.
“I wasn’t passive. If they were wrong in something, I’d say, ‘Here’s
how I understand it, but here’s how most people see this.’ I was always
trying to get them to kind of reconcile the two different things. I think for
those two Proud Boys, that was really important because they were
confronting all of these discrepancies between what they thought the group
was and what the group actually is. They were doing it in a kind of safe
environment where they know that I’m not going to dox them, and I’m not
out to get them, and they could confide in me. I think that helped a lot with
those two members that left.”
What never works, as Michael Caulfield advises, is shaming them—
though he believes public shaming of high-profile figures or participants in
violent behavior can be very effective in changing people’s behavior. “But
for your friends and family, what’s the alternative?” he asks rhetorically.
“You have their relationship with them, and it’s the only bargaining chip
you have, it’s the only thing that you’ve got. And if you make them make a
choice between that and you, I’m just not sure what that does for the
relationship.”
A rhetorical strategy that can be effective at this stage is to find
narratives that neutralize and potentially can replace the older narratives
around which they have constructed their worldview—particularly the
visceral, gut-level narratives that are so appealing to them. Drawing
someone enmeshed, for instance, in QAnon conspiracy theories away from
those beliefs is always helped by nudging reminders, delivered
nonthreateningly, that the billionaire president really did not have the best
interests of ordinary people in mind.
“We have a lot of data showing that if you want people to give up on
misinformation, you have to provide them with an alternative that explains
the noise,” says Stephan Lewandowsky. “‘Why is it that you shouldn’t
believe climate deniers?’ ‘Well, they’re funded by Exxon,’ is what they’re
going to say. That is a thing that is clearly doable and works for some
people.
“At most, people do not want to fall victim to a con man so if you can
convince them that they have been taken advantage of or victimized, then
that might turn them against the con man. However, in practice, that doesn’t
always work because people, once they become vested in something, are
reluctant to admit that they’ve been fooled. They don’t want to be fooled.
So you have to somehow provide that alternative narrative without
emphasizing the fact that they’ve been fooled themselves. It should be more
like, ‘Look at all these people out there who are exploiting vulnerable
people with their nonsense—surely you wouldn’t fall for that type of stuff.’
Or, ‘This guy is victimizing you, I want to help you get out of this hole that
he’s pulled you into.’”
13. Over time, your relationship with the other person will become
important enough to them that they will become more open to your
perspective and more willing to reconsider theirs.
14. Keep multiplying. Once they begin emerging from the rabbit hole,
help them to reconnect with their personal world—restoring old
relationships that have been ruptured—as well as to expand their
world by getting new experiences that may undermine some of their
bigoted or paranoid beliefs.
Samantha Kutner has found that helping her interlocutors actually come
face to face with some of the people they have demonized in their
conspiracist’s imagination has a powerful effect.
“I would really focus on having them come into contact with the groups
and the people that they’ve demonized in a controlled, safe setting,” she
says. “And having them see that the idea of whoever it is, whether it’s a
Jewish person or a black person or a Hispanic person, the idea that they’ve
been sold about these groups of people is not true; these stereotypes are lies.
“I think the contact hypothesis would be a really good approach to the
reflective, literary component. There would be self-work. There would be
outreach for people who were former extremists, and then there would be
people who don’t fit that mold that they’ve been conditioned to believe. It
would involve speaking to them and just saying, ‘Look, this is my life.’
Spend a few hours with me, and this is what I do.” People, after all, tend to
shed their horns and pitchforks after a cup of coffee with them.
15. Help them to heal. That must be the abiding principle behind every
one of these steps.
The baseline of this kind of undertaking is fixing something that has been
broken. Conspiracy theories break people. They break relationships,
families, communities, nations. They can be overcome only by human
healing and compassion backed by moral and ethical clarity, the antithesis
of the sociopathic world they engender.
The success of the process may hinge on the extent to which you and
the person you’re helping can interact in the real world. That’s Peter
Neumann’s advice, at least.
“They say of course the Internet offers opportunities to find people that
perhaps you wouldn’t interact with normally, but I think the aim should
then be to have an off-ramp where you pull it back into face-to-face
conversation,” he says. “I mean, a conversation can start on the Internet,
and if someone is willing to engage with you, that’s great, but I think
ultimately the solution needs to be face-to-face.
“And that’s why a lot of people are currently talking about this
combination, on and off, looking for people online, trying to figure out who
is potentially open to engaging, who has doubts and questions, but the
endgame is always to engage with them face-to-face and to have facility
that basically allows them to get real help and solve the problem that they
have.”
________
The work of saving the world from a descent into the madness of
conspiracism need not, of course, fall entirely on the shoulders of the
friends and family members of the people who fall into its snares. They
may turn out to be the most effective tool, but government, business, and
society at large have critical roles to play as well.
Peter Neumann’s International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at
King’s College, London, studied the problem of American online
radicalization in depth as early as 2013 and published a comprehensive
overview of how authorities can tackle it.
The first step: reducing the supply of extremist content. But that comes
with a major caveat.
“First comes the recognition that—for constitutional, political, and
practical reasons—it is impossible to remove all violent extremist material
from the Internet and that most efforts aimed at reducing the supply of
violent extremist content on the Internet are costly and counterproductive,”
it explains at the outset.15
Next: reducing the demand. These measures would work, “for example,
by discrediting, countering, and confronting extremist narratives or by
educating young people to question the messages they see online.”
Finally: exploiting the Internet. Making practical use of online content
and interactions for the purpose of gathering information, gaining
intelligence, and pursuing investigations is essential for preventing violence
and terrorism.
Neumann and his team explain that the steps involved in reducing the
supply of the content are limited, particularly in the United States because
of its constitutional free speech protections, in which censorship is
extremely circumscribed. In European nations, nationwide filters and legal
restrictions may affect the spread of extremist material in nations where
laws exist prohibiting it, but that won’t affect American consumers to any
appreciable extent. Indeed, “most of the traditional means for reducing the
supply of violent extremist content would be entirely ineffective or of very
limited use in the U.S. context,” the study explains.
The most viable option in the United States would involve commercial
takedowns of extremist material from the platforms where they fester, such
as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. Those companies have, since early
2019, begun making serious efforts at removing extremist content from
their platforms, though with mixed results.
“One practical option could be for government agencies to create and,
where appropriate, strengthen informal partnerships with Internet
companies whose platforms have been used by violent extremists,” the
study suggests. “The objective would be to assist their takedown teams—
through training, monthly updates, and briefings—in understanding national
security threats as well as trends and patterns in terrorist propaganda and
communication. As a result, online platforms such as Facebook and Google
would become more conscious of emerging threats, key individuals, and
organizations and could align their takedown efforts with national security
priorities.”
Reducing demand for extremist and terrorist material online is a much
more complicated proposition. Neumann’s study focuses on “activating the
marketplace of ideas”—that is, conducting outreach in the very spaces
where the radicalism is growing. It notes that chief among the drawbacks to
engaging people online is the decided “enthusiasm gap”: “Instead of having
extremist views drowned out by opposing views, the Internet has amplified
extremists’ voices.” The strategy is also hampered by significant gaps in the
pluralism of ideas, as well as major gaps in skill level.
More promising, it suggests, would be measures aimed at “creating
awareness” in a way that was effective and “building capacity in order to
assure that alternative voices are heard.” Countermessaging—which would
expose people to messages that are specifically designed to counter the
appeal of extremism—can also work, but it too has limitations when
coming from officials or authorities. For such campaigns to really work,
they have to be fueled and propagated at the grassroots level by ordinary
people.
The study also discusses ways that the Internet can be an effective tool
for gathering intelligence on political extremists, because so many of them
organize online. It can also be used by investigators in collecting evidence
of crimes afterward.
However, the centerpiece of the study was its finding that promoting
digital-media literacy was the “most long-term—yet potentially most
important—means of reducing the demand for online extremism.”
“In recent years, educators and policymakers have recognized the
unique risks and challenges posed by the Internet,” the study notes. “Most
efforts have focused on protecting children from predators and pedophiles,
with the result that—in practically every school—kids are now being taught
to avoid giving out personal details and to be suspicious of people in chat
rooms. Little, however, has been done to educate young people about
violent extremist and terrorist propaganda.”
Neumann says that families and friends still hold the keys for
preventing radicalization, because they see the effects in real life, while
others are seeing it online. Often, red-pilled young men are hiding those
activities, but their alienation and increasing anger levels also become
manifest in their daily workaday and family lives.
“We know that in terrorism cases, for example, when people radicalize,
we know that a lot of extremists who may be very deep in their extremist
worlds still have so-called bystanders—that is, they have friends, family,
people around them, colleagues at school, but most importantly family who
still have an influence on them.”
Many of these people express shock at the person’s radicalization
afterward, but many also acknowledge that they saw warning signs. And
even after they had fully immersed themselves in their extremist world and
embraced Nazism or Islamic State or whatever end the radicalization led to,
they would maintain their ties to these bystanders.
“So, even people who went to Syria to join ISIS, we’ve observed a lot
of them, they would still WhatsApp with their mom, because they were
missing them, and because for them, their father or their mother was still a
figure out of authority, not in all cases, but in some cases they were,”
Neumann said. “So, that’s why a lot of these programs, these countering
violent extremism programs are about empowering mothers, empowering
parents, etcetera.
“So, I do think that people should take an interest and should be
cognizant when suddenly one of their friends or their kids starts saying
weird stuff and gets into something that is really problematic, because they
all talk about it; we know about this. It’s not like they’re keeping quiet
about it, especially in the early phase when you discover a new paradigm
that explains a lot of things that you thought the government was keeping
secret. You’re very missionary, you’re talking about it all the time, and I do
think that so-called bystanders, family, friends, people at school should pay
attention to that.
“Because it’s exactly at that point that you can still intervene and that
you still have influence and you can still talk someone out of it or you can
engage with them, which at a later point may be much, much more difficult.
So, it is really important to pay attention to this and to be ready to engage in
a discussion about it for people who are connected to them, at an early
point.”
________
The question any investigative reporter worth his or her salt looking at the
twisted world of conspiracy theories and its globally toxic effects on every
level of society would ask is: who benefits?
Who stands to gain, monetarily and in power, from a phenomenon in
which large numbers of people form communities built around non-facts
and nonsense that inevitably crumble in fits of extremist rancor and
fiduciary miscreancy and, in the process, cut themselves off from their
communities and from the political process? Who gains when millions of
people dismiss democracy as a delusional joke and abandon what political
franchise they possess? Who gains when democracy is debilitated,
undermined, hollowed out from within?
Authoritarians do. Certainly authoritarians in government who prefer
that every act reflects the instincts of the revered leader atop the heap
because they believe that will produce a well-ordered society that also
makes them wealthy. But also particularly authoritarians who run
corporations that prefer operating without the constraints imposed by
democratic government, particularly health, labor, and employment
regulations, as well as environmental and work-place safety rules. These are
the people who stand to benefit when a democratic society defenestrates
itself, unlinks its arms from each other, retreating into survivalist bomb
shelters to await the apocalypse or the civil war, whichever comes first.
The world, in truth, has always had a kind of unapologetic conspiracy
operating in the open in every nation, under every form of government:
namely, the conspiracy of established authority, entrenched wealth, and
traditional cultural centers to maintain their positions and enhance and
expand them if possible. “He who has the gold, rules” as a cynical but
realistic version of the Golden Rule is not a new joke.
Conspiracy theories, sociologist Chip Berlet has long argued, are a kind
of wedge between ordinary people and reality whose whole purpose is to
distract the public’s attention from the very real conspiracy happening
before their faces.
“Conspiracism is neither a healthy expression of skepticism nor a valid
form of criticism; rather it is a belief system that refuses to obey the rules of
logic,” he explains. “These theories operate from a pre-existing premise of a
conspiracy based upon careless collection of facts and flawed assumptions.
What constitutes ‘proof’ for a conspiracist is often more accurately
described as circumstance, rumor, and hearsay; and the allegations often use
the tools of fear—dualism, demonization, scapegoating, and aggressively
apocalyptic stories—which all too often are commandeered by
demagogues.
“Thus conspiracism must be confronted as a flawed analytical model,
rather than a legitimate mode of criticism of inequitable systems, structures,
and institutions of power. Conspiracism is nearly always a distraction from
the work of uprooting hierarchies of unfair power and privilege.”16
“Conspiracy is really a tool of power,” observes Michael Caulfield, who
notes that in recent years, academic discourse about conspiracy theories has
wandered into discussions of “who gets labeled a conspiracy theorist and
who doesn’t.
“From my point of view, it’s been interesting to see that hit the wall of
Internet reality, where we’re looking at this massification of conspiracy
theory,” he says. “Some of that starts to look a little precious in terms of
what we’re looking at, precisely because of the sorts of violent events
which we’re talking about, but I think also because more and more people
are having this experience of watching people drift, bit by bit, deeper and
deeper into these communities.”
Kate Starbird first stumbled upon the machinations of foreign
authoritarians tampering with the world’s media ecosystems when she
scientifically examined the spread of misinformation about Black Lives
Matter and found clear evidence that Russian intelligence operatives were
deliberately sowing racial disharmony on social media. Now, she’s finding
a variety of strands of authoritarianism woven throughout a number of
disinformation campaigns whose data she and her team at University of
Washington have gathered.
She believes these campaigns are effective in large part because of the
environment in which it’s occurring, where more and more people are
adopting strong political identities.
“So if that political identity is strong and we’re very polarized, we’re
more susceptible to disinformation,” she says. “Disinformation targets
political division, and that’s also a place where we seem to be
psychologically susceptible to it as well.”
The work led her to examine Cold War propaganda techniques, where
much of the sponsored disinformation originates. “There are some really
interesting old books on Russian disinformation, particularly the Vladislav
Bitman books,” she says. “In one of them, he talks about how really
partisan political identities are ones that are easily manipulated in different
ways, and they said at the time, the KGB was really focused on targeting
the political left, because that aligned with historically their political
ideologies.
“But they’re saying that there’s no reason that these techniques wouldn’t
also work on the far right, and they’d already seen some instances of this as
well, because they said the vulnerabilities themselves aren’t about ideology.
They’re about being so committed to a political identity that you become
unable to differentiate truth versus familiarity and what you want to
believe.”
More current outbreaks of authoritarianism, such as the far-right regime
of Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, provide even more vivid insights into
how the disinformation functions. A recent network disinformation paper
was published out of a study in Manila where researchers from the
University of Leeds interviewed people who were participating in a
government disinformation campaign based on social media, troll accounts
that blamed “drug dealers” and liberal elites for all the nation’s ills. The
result, it found, was a “public sphere filled with information pollution and,
consequently, with toxic incivility and polarization.17
“We’ve been trying to figure out, what’s the intersection between these
populist movements and this disinformation infrastructure,” Starbird says.
“They intersect, but it’s not causal. It seems to be something else. And the
rise of these populist movements all over the world, why do they seem to
intersect?
“They’re authoritarian, because that’s their nature,” she adds, noting
that the populism all seems to be of the right-wing variant. “What we’ve
been seeing in a lot of these recent movements is that the leaders that are
able to take advantage of this are ones that are willing to reflect back at the
movements what they want to hear, which I guess is the basis of how
populism works. It’s grievance based, anti-elite based, which feeds into
conspiracism.
“But they’re able to reflect back some of the nastier parts of mob
behavior, which the Internet enables in all sorts of different ways. Then
these leaders have been able to take advantage of that in different ways.
And you can see the mediascape, the people that have risen in the new
media especially, becoming a media player out of doing the same kind of
thing, echoing back these kinds of things to the crowd. Finally, political
leaders are able to use social media directly to sense what people are talking
about and then reflect it right back at them. So we’re seeing that en masse.”
Formulating an effective response in defense of democracy itself is, in
fact, challenging, in large part because so many people living in those
democracies haven’t recognized that the ground is shifting around them and
the landscape with it.
“The hard thing is, there’s a really complex set of multiple things
happening in concert that are resonating,” Starbird says. “It’s great to
unpack them and understand them, but any one explanation is going to fall
short of being complete, because it’s such a complex system.”
The most essential step in tackling the spread of disinformation and
conspiracism on social media, she says, is “to build things that are
trustworthy. Not just social media, but all sorts of information ecosystems.
Journalism has to figure it out; social media has to figure it out. How do we
make trustworthy information-participation systems? There’s not an easy
answer to that.
“It feels like we’re being overwhelmed by something that we don’t
necessarily have the tools of society to grapple with. That seems to be
resonating in ways very quickly and unexpectedly with political conditions
and information systems and all of these things are resonating in ways that
are just putting us in a really bad place.”
The scenario, she says, reminds her of old film footage from 1940 of the
Tacoma Narrows Bridge in southern Puget Sound, a suspension bridge that
was renowned among drivers for wobbling unsteadily on windy days,
earning it the sobriquet “Galloping Gertie.” Opening on July 1 that year, it
remained up only until November, when a powerful windstorm created such
wild oscillations that the bridge came apart and fell into the Sound. Film
footage showing the bridge structure warping wildly before its collapse
became iconic in the Pacific Northwest.
“Galloping Gertie—I feel like that’s what’s happening,” she says. “It’s
just hitting us one way and something else is hitting us a different way. It’s
hitting this resonance, and it’s out of control.
“What is it going to take to cut it? Maybe that keeps going until
everything just gets shattered to pieces, or maybe we just figure out how to
get out of that loop, and we can resolve some of it.”
________
We know what taking the so-called “red pill” looks like. If we could devise
a “blue pill,” what would happen? What would it do to you? To what would
you “awaken”?
First and foremost, it would be about embracing the clear cold light of
reality: the workaday world of “normies,” based on normative
evidence, facts, logic, and reason, one filled with ordinary people
doing ordinary things, dispelling the web of dark conspiracism with
which the red-pilled cocoon themselves.
The complexity of modern life would be seen clearly for what it is: a
vast web that is connected not at some crude and imaginary dot-to-dot
scheme overseen by a nefarious plot, but by the ordinary human
connections every person makes in their daily lives—infinitely more
complex, infinitely more real, and infinitely beyond any scheme that
any radio show host can cook up for gullible audiences.
You would enjoy facts—the ones established through the reliable
sources you enjoy seeking out now. Facts, however, would no longer
be based on your sources’ conjecture, but on objectively reliable
information from well-grounded, verifiable authorities. Science would
cease to be a liberal conspiracy.
Human decency and compassion would cease to be discarded as a
liability; we would develop an awareness of how conspiracism
destroys relationships, harms innocent people, and, at the horrifying
violent end of its funnel, produces death.
Media consumption would return to the workaday world. That
wouldn’t mean that you suddenly decide to accept every word
published in the New York Times or uttered on CNN as unvarnished
truth. Rather, you would again clearly see the complex and difficult
reality: that corporate ownership has distorted our information diet,
that the mainstream media can produce correct and valuable
information, yet it weaves distortions and falsehoods and omissions
into its coverage in ways that require constant vigilance by consumers.
You would cease suspecting that the motives of everyone in your
world are connected under the umbrella of a mind-controlling
conspiracy and realize that the complex ordinary world is run on
billions of individual human motivations, some of them malign, most
of them benign and very . . . human.
Media consumption habits would be affected by the shift in your
perceptions of media contents. Toxic places like 4chan and Infowars
would lose their appeal, largely because their viciousness and
estrangement from factual truth will have lost their appeal. Mainstream
media would still, however, be nearly as problematic as it was before
—just without the obscuring layer of accusa-tory hysteria with which
their broadcasts are viewed through the prism of the conspiracist
worldview.
The blue pill would eventually induce a kind of mindful empathy or
rational compassion, open-minded but not naïve. As you resume
relationships with family and connect with old and new friends and
expand your horizons to include human generosity, you’ll find it
increasingly easier to be at relative ease in the world wherever you are
and whomever you are with. Like, you know, a normie.
It would fix what’s broken. But not right away. The pill works
gradually. It takes time, forbearance, love, patience, compassion. All
those old-fashioned words come together in one great and real thing:
healing.