FACT OR FICTION?
How conspiracies become mainstream
Talk to a supporter WASHINGTON of President Donald Trump and, at some point in the conversation, you are likely to hear some version of this: “The mainstream media is fake news. They ignore all the good things Trump is doing because they hate him and wanted Hillary to win. That’s why they spend so much time on this ridiculous Russia story and not enough time investigating whether Trump Tower was actually wiretapped!”
Talk to an opponent of Trump and, at some point in the conversation, you are likely to hear some version of this: “Russia has something on Trump. Michael Flynn, Jeff Sessions, Paul Manafort, and the president’s own unwillingness to bad-mouth Vladimir Putin and Russia all make clear that he is being secretly controlled by a foreign power. He needs to be impeached!”
What those two views reflect is the fact that we live in “X-Files” time now. Conspiracy theories aren’t dismissed; instead, they’re taken as something close to fact.
“Prove that the conspiracy theory is wrong!” is now our default position as a society.
Now, conspiracy theories have always been with us — there was a second shooter in the JFK assassination, 9-11 was an inside job, and so on and so forth — but they have almost always existed on the fringes of political dialogue. Not anymore. We are all conspiracy theorists.
Here’s what Paul Musgrave, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, wrote in a piece for The Washington Post last week:
“Less than two months into the administration, the danger is no longer that Trump will make conspiracy thinking mainstream. That has already come to pass. Conspiracy theories, rumour and outright lies now drive the news cycle ... In the long term, the damage done to trust by the normalization of untruth may threaten the social contract on which democracy itself rests.”
It’s important to remember how closely Trump’s roots in politics are tied to his willingness to embrace conspiracy theories.
His candidacy was made possible by his embrace of the disproved idea that president Barack Obama wasn’t born in the U.S.
During the course of the 2016 campaign, Trump regularly brought conspiracy theories to the centre of the conversation. He sat down with noted conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and promised he would do so as president, as well (he hasn’t — yet). He suggested that Sen. Ted Cruz’s father was part of the plot to assassinate John F. Kennedy.
That conspiracy flirtation has continued as president — with the wiretapping tweets serving as the most prominent example.
Trump seems entirely comfortable taking a conspiracy theory and, with scant evidence, pushing it into the mainstream.
Trump’s assertion that he had evidence to prove the wiretapping claims made by conservative talk show host Mark Levin and championed by Breitbart News turned out to not be true — or at least not true yet. And the Trump White House is trying to claim victory and move on, insisting that his only goal was to get congressional committees to look into the allegations in search of evidence — evidence that he insisted he already had.
What Trump knows is that for many of the people who support him, the fact he has not offered any actual evidence of the alleged wiretapping is besides the point. Of course the evidence isn’t readily available — the political establishment is doing everything it can to cover it up and make Trump look bad!
So severe is the distrust directed at the media that if the media says there is no factual basis for Trump’s claims, that functions for his supporters as a sort of testimonial that he must be right.
On the other side of the political spectrum, there is the growing sense among Democrats that Trump is, in some serious way, in hock to the Russian government.
That Trump’s former national security adviser and current attorney general both misremembered conversations they had with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak is taken as certain evidence of this fact.
As is the fact that Trump refuses to issue a stern condemnation of Putin and Russia.
As always, conspiracy theories could be true. The most prominent example is the reporting the National Enquirer did in the 2008 presidential campaign about a child that then Democratic senator John Edwards had fathered out of wedlock.
But for every one conspiracy theory that winds up being true, there are a thousand — or a million — that are totally without merit. That used to be a sentence that 98 per cent of the population could agree on. No longer.
Our retreat into partisan camps, the rising dislike and distrust of “elites,” the surge in partisan media outlets and the collapse of trust in the mainstream media has created a toxic environment in which conspiracy theories not only can bloom but are nurtured.
Less than two months into the administration, the danger is no longer that Trump will make conspiracy thinking mainstream. That has already come to pass.