One crazy conspiracy theory after another is being rehabilitated in the mouths of high-profile, mainstream figures. The inmates have taken over the asylum.
There was a time when paranoid conspiracy theorists were fringe figures. Nobody with any credibility, whether in the scientific world, in the media or in politics, would go anywhere near them, for fear of being pigeonholed as credulous idiots.
There also was a time when right-wing pseudoscience or conspiracy theories were fairly rare, and because they came from different ideological perspectives, were easily distinguishable from the far more common left-wing pseudoscience or conspiracy theories. (For the sake of brevity, I’ll refer to conspiracy theories, pseudoscience and similar false beliefs using the technical term “bullshit”.)
All this changed with the rise of the alt-right MAGA movement. It has brought many ideas that were once fringe, or associated with left-wing nuttiness, right into the main stream of right-wing thought.
They’re being promoted by some of the most popular figures of the alt-right, like Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan.
And they’re not just the sort of political conspiracy theories one might expect from highly partisan discourse, involving alleged underhanded shenanigans by political opponents which might or might not be true.
I’m talking about batshit crazy tinfoil hat beliefs that were once limited to the nutty fringes and call into question both the intelligence and the mental health of their proponents.
Left-wing bullshit
It used to be fairly easy to pigeonhole the average bullshit believer.
If the theory is grounded in a fundamental mistrust of capitalism, corporations, or the technology they develop, you could be fairly sure that the true believer you had the misfortune of encountering was a radical left-wing nutcase.
The belief that genetic engineering in agriculture is dangerous or toxic is typically left-wing.
So is the belief that using nuclear power is akin to putting radioactive waste in the path of innocent schoolchildren.
That the body needs to be “detoxed” from all the “chemicals” that “Big Food” puts in your lunch is an anti-capitalist belief.
That “natural” chemicals are somehow more virtuous than “synthetic” chemicals, even though there is no qualitative difference between the two and chemicals turn out to be toxic or carcinogenic at roughly equal rates no matter their origin reflects a fear of modern industry.
The belief that pharmaceutical companies deliberately suppress cures for diseases like cancer to maintain profits demonstrates both anti-capitalist bias and a poor grasp of how competition would counter such a conspiracy.
Likewise, the belief that vaccination programmes are secretly meant to make people sick, to depopulate the planet, or make the population docile and compliant.
There’s the belief that “natural remedies” and esoteric healing methods like “energy medicine”, reiki or homeopathy should be preferred over evidence-based medicine.
The fear that civilisation faces an existential crisis from overpopulation, or nuclear winter, or global warming is typically rooted in condemnation of prosperity as perceived capitalist excess.
The belief that large corporations don’t care about the environment and pollute it at will just because it is more profitable to do so is another typical anti-capitalist belief that denies the importance of brand reputations, and the fact that corporations are staffed by people just like you and me.
All of these, and many more, are typical of left-wing paranoia and anti-establishment sentiment.
Right-wing bullshit
Right-wing bullshit has traditionally centred more on distrust of government and elites.
The theory that 9/11 was an inside job or a false flag operation to justify government surveillance and military adventures is typically associated with the right. (Of course, it was used to justify surveillance and military adventures; the bullshit part is that it was deliberately planned and executed not by foreign enemies, but by domestic government agents, to provide such a justification.)
The prepper, militia and sovereign citizen movements, which try to escape the real or perceived tyrannical power of government is based on a paranoid level of fear of the state. (Again, that government power can be, and often is, tyrannical, is not in dispute. That you need to retreat to an off-grid ranch for paramilitary drills and post-apocalypse survival training, however, is.)
The belief that the civil service bureaucracy operates as a “deep state” that actually pulls the strings of politicians, so that even national leaders are mere puppets implementing the hidden agenda of a shadowy elite, and that a high-level intelligence operative named Q dropped crumbs of insider information to autists on anime image boards that revealed it all, is a right-wing delusion.
That there is a global plot, akin to what was once described as the “illuminati”, to impose a Marxist “new world order” upon the world, with tentacles that reach into every public institution right down to elementary schools, is typical of right-wing paranoia.
Apolitical bullshit
There were also theories that never had a particular partisan identity, and are more rooted in existential fears or anxiety about technology and progress.
These include bullshit about ancient aliens or modern UFOs (which the criminally misnamed History Channel has dressed up as, well, “history”), anxiety about new technologies such as 5G, fears of global pandemics and virulent diseases deployed as biological weapons, or moral panics about devil worship and the corrupting influence of mass media.
All of these types of bullshit reflect a deeper epistemic crisis: the erosion of trust in expertise, institutions, and shared sources of truth.
Until recently, however, you’d be hard pressed to find crazy bullshit in the mainstream of the information flow that we consume. But not anymore.
Part of the reason is the demise of professional journalism as a gatekeeper. Citizen journalism has given millions a voice, and has rightly challenged many of the elitist media narratives of yesteryear. However, the baby that was thrown out with the bathwater is professional training to use multiple reliable sources to corroborate and verify claims, to present information in a neutral way, and to quote experts who have studied a subject and can be expected to expound on it with a greater degree of understanding than someone who just casually googled a topic.
Another major cause of the resurgence of bullshit, however, is the rise of the alt-right and the MAGA movement.
Nutcase exhibit A
The most popular podcast in the world is The Joe Rogan Experience.
Joe Rogan is a former fight commentator, comedian and television presenter whose shtick is open-minded inquiry, often into topics of dubious merit.
In 2013, he had a short-lived television series on the SyFy channel. In six episodes, he investigated Bigfoot, weaponised weather, the cyborg singularity, the prospect of a bio-apocalypse, UFOs, and psychics. At the time, he was descibed as “skeptical” but “open-minded”.
The risk of engaging with crank topics, and actual cranks like Alex Jones, who has been a frequent guest on Rogan’s show, is that you’ll become convinced yourself.
On a number of topics, this appears to have happened with Rogan. He never stopped talking about weird, esoteric bullshit, and increasingly appears to believe that much of it is real.
His podcasts are very long, rambling affairs. They tend to last three hours, and when transcribed, could fill half a book.
In an episode earlier this year, he’s talking to another podcaster about stuff like whether the pyramids were secret chemical factories, and talk turns to the Apollo moon landings.
Rogan remarks that Stanley Kubrick could absolutely have faked that footage. His guest says that they would have had a “plan B” if the moonlanding didn’t succeed, since it was part of the space race, which they needed to win.
Rogan continues: “This is part of the problem with um I think it was Apollo 12 or 13, whichever one it was, where they got the footage of the, the lunar module leaving the, the moon and going back towards the orbiter. And it looks so fake. It looks so fake. It looks so ridiculous. There’s no plumes of, of fire. Like, how does it have the power? Where’s the engine? … It’s still one sixth the Earth’s gravity. It’s still a significant amount of gravity. It’s not the same gravity as Earth, but how does that thing like shoot off into space? Like that’s nonsense. It looks like it’s being pulled by strings. Yeah. And the camera, which is operated, you know, remotely pans perfectly to catch it. Like, shut the fuck up. But how are you getting that footage? Like, what are you doing? This is 1969. You’re on the phone with Richard Nixon from the moon? Are you out of your fucking mind? Is this supposed to be real?”
If you don’t want to delve through 37,000 words of transcript, there’s a written summary of that segment here.
He’s not outright declaring the moon landings to have been faked, but he’s certainly entertaining the idea as a lot more than just plausible.
That sort of bullshit used to be grounds to be dismissed as a crank and a lunatic. Not anymore, it seems.
Nutcase exhibit B
Then there’s Tucker Carlson. He has decided that chemtrails are, well, real. It makes no sense to him that the trails left by aeroplanes in the sky could be condensation.
So, he says, “We spent the last six months trying to find someone credible who could explain that to us. A serious, sane person with an engineering background who could tell us what are we looking at, cause we’re looking at something and I don’t care what names you call me, I still want to know what it is. And we think we have found that person. Dane Wigington of Northern California has been on this subject for almost 30 years and has compiled what we believe, after looking at it pretty carefully, is the most comprehensive account of what we’re seeing. And it’s very bad.”
Carlson starts by going to Wikipedia. He quotes: “The chemtrail conspiracy theory is the erroneous belief that long-lasting condens, condensation trails left in the sky by high-flying aircraft are actually quote chemtrails consisting of chemical or biological agents sprayed for nefarious purposes undisclosed to the general public….”
After quoting the first paragraph of the Wikipedia writeup, he turns conspiratorial: “So I read that and the purpose, of course, of that paragraph is not to illuminate what this might be, but to attack anyone who speculate about what it might be. It’s a form itself of psychological warfare of propaganda. And when I read that, I said to myself, there’s clearly something going on because the people who control Wikipedia, which would be the intel agencies, as we know, don’t want anyone to talk about this.”
If this were true, one might expect that the intelligence agents who control Wikipedia might have been careful not to explain what contrails really are further down the article, but no, they blabbed, in extensive detail, complete with scores of citations.
Wigington, Carlson’s guest, has form. As Carlson said, he spent 30 years banging on about stuff like this, and about how the weather has been weaponised. He routinely claims to find the signature of covert military weather control in droughts, such as the recent drought in California.
When a climate scientist at Cornell University criticised his work a few years ago, Wigington sued him for defamation, but the case was dismissed with costs.
This is the sort of crank that Carlson considers “credible” and “sane”.
Wigington claims that chemtrails put “nano-particles” of “bioavailable free form alumin[i]um” in the air. He’s personally tested his rainwater, and that’s what it is, he says. And he says it is toxic to all life-forms.
None of this is true. For a start, elemental aluminium oxidises within seconds on exposure to air, so nanoparticles of “free form” aluminium would almost immediately turn into aluminium oxide. Aluminium oxide is fairly non-reactive, and is not particularly toxic, except by chronic occupational inhalation.
And if there were toxic levels of aluminium oxide in the air, we all would have the symptoms: conjunctivitis, pharyngitis, and nasal irritation. All of us. Including the evil people who put the chemtrails in the air.
Carlson and his guest can’t seem to decide what the chemtrails are actually for. They riff on weather modification for military purposes, on creating a reflective layer in the atmosphere to counteract global warming (in which Carlson does not believe), and on the dispersion of toxic chemicals like “alumin[i]um, barium, strontium, manganese, surfactants, polymer fibers and graphene”.
The whole notion of “chemtrails” as a delivery system for either weather modification, or geo-engineering to combat climate change, or to deliver drugs or toxins to the population, is absurd. It would be the most inefficient delivery system conceivable, no matter its alleged purpose.
The dilution effect alone means you have to be a truly committed homeopath to believe that thin streaks of chemicals released at 30,000 feet could possibly remain concentrated enough to affect plant, animal and human life on the surface.
And again, it wouldn’t discriminate. If I’m an evil government leader trying to poison the population, I’d use a delivery system that doesn’t reach me. I’d use a delivery system where a little poison would go a long way, instead of one where only one part in a million reaches my intended target. I’d poison food or drinking water, in a way that wouldn’t affect my food or drinking water.
I wouldn’t poison the air, because I have to breathe that too, and I’d have to use a million barrels of poison to achieve my evil objective.
Every claim cranks like Wigington make is easy to debunk, but I’m not going to do it. It’s been done before, and when I die, I’d like to think I spent my limited time more productively than that.
Yet Tucker Carlson, a mainstream thought leader of the alt-right movement, believes chemtrails cannot be condensation and that there’s something nefarious going on. It’s delulu, as the young folk say these days.
Cranks in charge
If some of the biggest voices in the alt-right and MAGA movement are earnestly promoting age-old crackpot theories, is it any wonder that nutjobs like Marjorie Taylor Greene get elected to Congress? It is any wonder that conspiracy nuts like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. get put in charge of public health, and he promises to stop chemtrails?
No wonder Donald Trump can get re-elected, even though any self-respecting conservative ought to be able to see through his bluster and bullshit.
I thought he was getting elected to release the Epstein files. Then we got some liberally redacted flight logs and some dodgy doggerel allegedly forged and planted in 2003 by an extraordinarily prescient Democratic Party dirty tricks operative, and were told to stop talking about Epstein because it’s all a hoax.
And the MAGA faithful swallow it all like good little sheep.
Once truth becomes whatever the most powerful voices say, and people stand ready to believe even the most comprehensively debunked bullshit, it is no wonder that voters will believe even the most transparent propaganda.
It is no wonder they’ll believe the most heinous libels about people who aren’t in their political camp. It’s no surprise that the MAGA faithful parrot their leaders’ denunciations of Mexicans as rapists and murderers, of refugees as eaters of pets, of protesters as terrorists, of trans people as crazy and drag queens as groomers, and of Republicans who oppose Trump as woke left-wingers.
The lunatics are running the asylum, truth is dead, and reality is whatever the alt-right movement’s leaders say it is. Welcome to the New World Order.
[Image: Anti-chemtrail grafitti on a wall in Berlin, ca. 2012. Photo: Steffen Zahn, used under CC BY-SA 2.0 licence]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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