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Please write an essay about the COVID-19 conspiracy theories, there’s more specific instructions in the “Unit 4 Essay” pdf. I have linked the rubric/ explanation about the required things for this essay so please follow the rubric and instructions they’re very straightforward. I also linked the required articles that must be used in this essay, use credible sources for the essay as well. DO NOT plagiarize or use AI, please use your own words. The essay should be in MLA format, 5-7 pages no more and no less, and have a work cited page as well. Paragraphs should be 6/7 sentences. Let me know if you need anything else.
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MLA Citation:
Brotherton, Rob. “Chapter Three: What Is a Conspiracy Theory.” Suspicious Minds. Bloomsbury, 2016. pp.
61-80.
What Is a Conspiracy Theory?
ROB BROTHERTON
ON September 11, 2001, hijackers crashed
airplanes into the World Trade Center towers in
New York City, the Pentagon in Washington,
D.C., and a field in Pennsylvania, killing 2,996
people. The attack was secretly planned by
members of al-Qaeda.
Or . . .
On September 11, 2001, hijackers crashed
airplanes into the World Trade Center towers in
New York City, the Pentagon in Washington,
D.C., and a field in Pennsylvania, killing 2,996
people. The attack was secretly planned by
members of the United States government.
It seems like everyone knows what a
conspiracy theory is. The phrase peppers
mainstream news websites and obscure
Internet forums alike; trips off the tongues of
politicians and pundits; graces the titles of
books, films, and television shows; and has
been appended to alternative explanations for
just about everything. It’s easy to reel off
examples. The moon landing was faked, the
CIA killed Kennedy, Princess Diana was
murdered, the Freemasons are up to no good,
the New World Order is taking over.
But simply listing conspiracy theories
doesn’t explain what a conspiracy theory is.
Consider those two accounts of 9/11. Both offer
an explanation for something that happened in
the world. Both explain it as the result of a
conspiracy. On paper, the claims are virtually
identical. The only difference is in the
organization cast as the conspirators. And yet
only one of the statements is widely referred to
as a conspiracy theory. Why is that? What’s the
difference? Is there a difference?
When in search of a definition, a good place
to start is in a dictionary. The Oxford English
Dictionary added an entry for conspiracy theory
in 1997: “The theory that an event or
phenomenon occurs as a result of a conspiracy
between interested parties.” Merriam-Webster’s
Collegiate Dictionary (Eleventh Edition) offers a
similar interpretation, albeit with the addition of
a vague hint that the perpetrators might be
influential: “A theory that explains an event or
set of circumstances as a result of a secret plot
by usually powerful conspirators.”
A conspiracy theory, according to these
literal-minded definitions, is essentially just a
theory about a conspiracy. But when people call
something a conspiracy theory, they’re usually
not talking about just any old conspiracy.
Conspiracies, after all, are a dime a dozen.
From outlaws plotting bank heists to corporate
executives planning to mislead their customers,
and from drug smuggling and bribery to coups,
kidnappings, assassinations, and terrorist
attacks, plenty of things happen in the world are
the result of conspiracy between interested
parties or secret plots by powerful conspirators.
There’s nothing especially noteworthy about
theorizing the existence of conspiracies like
these. Our definition ought to reflect how people
actually use the term, and in regular
conversation not every theory about a
conspiracy qualifies as a conspiracy theory. The
term is more than the sum of its parts.
A common objection to studying conspiracy
theories as a psychological phenomenon is that
each theory is unique; they come in a
staggering variety of shapes and sizes, and it
makes no sense to lump them all together.
While engaging each claim on its own unique
evidential merits is undoubtedly the only way to
get to the bottom of whether that particular
theory is true or not, that’s not the question that
concerns us here. We’re interested in
conspiracy theories not as empirical
hypotheses, but as ideas that people believe—
or disbelieve, as the case may be. And the fact
is, for all their outer differences, if we look below
the surface, at the logic and structure and
assumptions that form the foundation of the
claims, conspiracy theories start to look a lot
alike.
There’s no one-size-fits-all definition. All
definitions of complex ideas are fuzzy around
the edges if you think about them for long
enough. The difficulty of defining the term
conspiracy theory has been likened to
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attempting to define pornography—a task that
famously forced United States Supreme Court
Justice Potter Stewart to conclude, simply, “I
know it when I see it.” But even if we can’t hope
to come up with a precise, succinct, universally
agreeable definition of conspiracy theory, we
can still put together a useful enough working
definition. Richard Hofstadter, an influential
scholar of conspiracism, talked about
conspiracy theories as a “style” of explanation.
Much as a historian of art might speak of the
motifs that collectively constitute the baroque
style, or a music critic might parse the subtle
differences between dubstep and grime, our
task in distinguishing conspiracy theories from
regular old theories about conspiracies is to
identify some of the most important rhetorical
themes, tropes, and flourishes that collectively
constitute the conspiracist style.
David Aaronovitch called his book on twentiethcentury conspiracy theories Voodoo Histories.
Francis Wheen is similarly damning in How
Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World, while the
subtitle of Damian Thompson’s
Counterknowledge lumps conspiracy theories
together with “quack medicine, bogus science,
and fake history.”
How about people on the receiving end of
the label? “To be sure, wacko conspiracy
theories do exist,” Michael Parenti
acknowledged in Dirty Truths—but the idea that
a conspiracy was behind JFK’s assassination is
an indisputable fact, he argues, and therefore
doesn’t belong in the category of “kooky
fantasies.” British journalist Robert Fisk made a
similar disclaimer in a 2007 op-ed for the
Independent on the subject of the 9/11 attacks.
“I am not a conspiracy theorist. Spare me the
ravers. Spare me the plots,” he wrote,
immediately after repeating classic 9/11 Truther
canards, such as the apparent implausibility of
World Trade Center Building 7’s collapse. As
psychologist Jovan Byford points out in
Conspiracy Theories: A Critical Introduction,
Parenti and Fisk aren’t denying that conspiracy
theories are bogus, they are just passing the
buck. Conspiracy theories are not to be
believed, the argument goes—but this ain’t one.
Only other people believe conspiracy theories, it
seems.
So pretty much everyone seems to agree
that there is a distinction to be made.
Conspiracy theories are bogus; a claim of
conspiracy that’s true isn’t really a conspiracy
theory at all. Does that mean we can go ahead
and define conspiracy theory as a false claim of
conspiracy? Some scholars think so. According
to historian Daniel Pipes’s definition, “a
conspiracy theory is the fear of a nonexistent
conspiracy.” Some conspiracies are real, he
admits, but conspiracy theories “exist only in the
imagination.” Political scientists Cass Sunstein
and Adrian Vermeule made the same point,
though dressed up in slightly more restrained
academic lingo, proposing to limit their study of
conspiracy theories to claims that are
“demonstrably false,” ruling out “ones that are
true or whose truth is undetermined.”
The problem with going down this path is
that it treats the distinction between true and
false, real and imaginary as entirely
uncomplicated—a matter of simply consulting
the facts, or even, as David Aaronovitch
suggests (quoting the historian Lewis Namier),
Unanswered Questions
Where better to begin than with the question
that causes most of the animosity between
conspiracy theorists and their critics: Are
conspiracy theories simply wrong? There’s no
denying that the label has less-than-favorable
connotations in some intellectual circles, at
least. “If you’re down at a bar in the slums, and
you say something that people don’t like, they’ll
punch you or shriek four-letter words,” Noam
Chomsky once said. “If you’re in a faculty club
or an editorial office, where you’re more polite—
there’s a collection of phrases that can be used
which are the intellectual equivalent of fourletter words and tantrums. One of them is
‘conspiracy theory.’”
Plenty of journalists—or, at least, their
headline-writing copy editors—are happy to
write off conspiracy theories as self-evidently
delusional, judging by the frequency with which
the term conspiracy theory is accompanied by
adjectives like crazy, wacky, and debunked in
the click-baiting headlines of otherwise more
demure authors. Politicians, too, generally sling
the term around when they want to imply that
unflattering allegations are entirely unfounded.
George W. Bush provided a famous example
when he urged his fellow Americans never to
“tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories
concerning the attacks on September 11,
malicious lies that attempt to shift blame away
from terrorists themselves, away from the
guilty.” Maybe scholars are more reserved?
Going by the titles of some of the books dealing
with belief in conspiracy theories, not so much.
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employing an “intuitive understanding of how
things do not happen.” But intuition leads
different people to very different conclusions.
One person’s conspiracy theory is the next
person’s conspiracy fact. Any attempt to draw a
neat line between true and false conspiracies is
doomed to endless debate about what evidence
is compelling, who the real experts are, and
whether they can be trusted. These are all good
questions, but as far as our definition goes,
blithely asserting that conspiracy theories are
bullshit doesn’t get us very far.
More importantly, getting hung up on
determining whether a contested claim is true or
false misses a crucial feature of the conspiracist
style. Kathryn Olmsted said it most clearly when
she wrote that “a conspiracy theory is a
proposal about a conspiracy that may or may
not be true; it has not yet been proven.” At first
glance, this might seem to simply invite more
bickering about the definition of proven. For
believers, a theory may be true beyond doubt;
for doubters, it may be unquestionably false.
But that’s not the issue. I’m not saying
conspiracy theories are unproven merely
because they have failed to meet some
evidential bar. I’m suggesting something
deeper. Conspiracy theories are unproven by
design.
By way of example, consider two potential
explanations of the Watergate affair. According
to one account, Nixon’s reelection committee
conspired to spy on his political rivals, and
Nixon himself subsequently got involved in the
conspiracy to cover up the fact. Despite alleging
a conspiracy to subvert democracy extending all
the way up to the Oval Office, nobody calls this
a conspiracy theory. Why? Because it’s
describing a conspiracy that is over and done
with. Nixon’s lackeys were caught breaking into
the Watergate Hotel, evidence of the cover-up
was laid out, and Nixon eventually resigned the
presidency. The beans have been spilled.
According to another account—this one put
forward by Gary Allen, coauthor of the classic
None Dare Call It Conspiracy—Nixon wasn’t
behind the Watergate conspiracy at all. It was a
setup. The scandal, according to Allen, was
carefully engineered to get Nixon out of the
White House as part of a bigger, even more
sinister conspiracy involving Nelson Rockefeller,
Henry Kissinger, the Council on Foreign
Relations, and the coming New World Order.
Now we’ve got ourselves a conspiracy theory.
Being as yet unproven is baked right into it.
Even if you are convinced that it’s true, the
theory itself tells us that the cover-up is
ongoing. Kissinger hasn’t come clean, the
public is still in the dark, the truth is yet to be
fully revealed.
We can see the same dichotomy in our two
competing versions of 9/11. According to the
view that al-Qaeda did it, the conspiracy has
come to an end, and we pretty much know all
there is to know—not least because Osama Bin
Laden owned up to it. According to the insidejob theory, however, the real perpetrators are
still busily scheming to hide the incredible truth.
The theory may or may not be true; either way,
to endorse it is to assert that the conspiracy has
not yet come undone. Same goes for any other
conspiracy theory you care to mention. The
deed may have been done, but the perpetrators
have not fessed up or been caught. The masses
are still in the dark, the cat remains in the bag,
the beans have yet to be spilled.
As scholar Mark Fenster explained,
conspiracy theories don’t merely aim to describe
something that has happened; they purport to
reveal hitherto undiscovered plots in the hopes
of persuading the as yet unalerted masses.
They come with a tacit admission that the
ultimate truth is just out of reach, behind the
next curtain, able to be glimpsed but not yet
grasped. The conspiracy is forever being
unraveled, but the holy grail of incontrovertible
proof—the undeniable evidence that will alert
the masses and finally topple the house of
cards—has not yet been produced. Whether
they turn out to be true or not, conspiracy
theories, deep down, are unanswered
questions.
Nothing Is As It Appears
Most conspiracy theories of 9/11 assert that
the attacks were a “false flag” operation. The
term originally referred to ships literally hoisting
a flag other than their true nationality, usually for
the purposes of piracy or warfare. The meaning
of the term has since expanded; it now
encompasses any instance in which a country
organizes an attack against its own citizens and
makes it look like someone else did it, as a
pretext for some nefarious goal like passing
draconian laws or starting wars.
As precedent for the U.S. government’s
alleged willingness to orchestrate attacks
against its own citizens, one might point to
Operation Northwoods. The plan, drafted by
military chiefs in the early 1960s, was for U.S.
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government operatives to arrange acts of
terrorism against American military and civilian
targets and pin them on the Cuban government.
“We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo
Bay and blame Cuba,” one document reads;
“Casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause
a helpful wave of national indignation.” Other
ideas included sinking a boatload of incoming
Cuban refugees, and staging terrorist attacks in
Florida and Washington, D.C. Fortunately,
however, even military chiefs have to run plans
like that by their bosses, and the Kennedy
administration immediately nixed the operation.
According to conspiracy theorists, however,
other administrations have proved far more
amenable. In the case of 9/11, the theories go,
what appears to be the action of al-Qaeda was
an inside job, a self-inflicted wound. In the years
since 9/11, cries of “false flag” have followed
just about every mass shooting and terrorist
attack. Yet the current fashion for false-flag
theories is a product of old habits. Our second
crucial element of the conspiracist style is the
idea that we’re not merely being kept in the dark
about something—we are being actively fooled.
In the world according to conspiracy theories,
appearances mislead, and nothing is quite as it
seems.
This feature is most obvious when
conspiracy theories rub up against official
stories. We are told that the 9/11 attacks were
pulled off by nineteen al-Qaeda hijackers, acting
on plans devised by Osama Bin Laden, and that
they succeeded thanks in large part to
incompetence, bureaucratic inertia, and petty
rivalries between the agencies in charge of
national security. As for the Twin Towers and
World Trade Center Building 7, they collapsed
due to structural damage and fire. This general
account is based on several investigations of
huge proportions, amassing insights from
thousands of individual experts with differing
specialties and affiliations, and has been
queried, substantiated, clarified, and extended
by many more independent scholars.
As far as the conspiracy theories are
concerned, however, George W. Bush—or
whoever is really in charge of things—simply
pulled the story out of his back pocket. When
they balk at “official stories” or “governmentsanctioned explanations,” conspiracy theorists
imply that mainstream understanding of the
event is nothing more than one possible
interpretation, cooked up by some selfprofessed authority. Worse, it is often thought to
be handed down by the very people who are
behind the alleged conspiracy. It’s not merely a
mistaken account, but a deliberate fabrication.
The official story is, according to conspiracy
theorists, just what the authorities want us to
believe.
Of course, “official stories” don’t deserve our
unreserved acceptance. Both the Warren
Commission report on JFK’s assassination and
the 9/11 Commission Report contained flaws
and omissions. But that’s not to say they are
entirely useless, either. The best explanation is
one that is backed up by multiple, independent,
converging sources. Painting an explanation as
the “official story” means it can be written off
wholesale, even if it actually reflects the
accumulated insights of a multitude of people,
with differing affiliations and agendas, all
arriving at a broadly consistent explanation.
(Much as the term conspiracy theory, I might
add, is sometimes used to dismiss inconvenient
points of view with little consideration of the
evidence.)
Opposing an official explanation isn’t a
prerequisite, however. Conspiracy theories can
be conjured up in the immediate aftermath of an
event, before an official story has had time to
take shape. And sometimes a conspiracy theory
is the official explanation. As Jesse Walker
points out in United States of Paranoia, America
was founded on conspiracist suspicions. The
Declaration of Independence painstakingly lists
a “long train of abuses and usurpations” the
Colonies have suffered, adding up to “a design”
to establish “absolute Tyranny over these
States.”
Distaste for official stories is just a symptom
of the deeper logic of the conspiracist style.
Mike Wood and Karen Douglas explain that
conspiracy theories operate on the assumption
that “there are two worlds: one real and (mostly)
unseen, the other a sinister illusion meant to
cover up the truth.” As a result, conspiracy
theories are contrarian by nature. They flip
conventional wisdom on its head. In the world
according to conspiracy theories, the obvious
answer is never correct, and there is always
more to things than meets the eye. Accidents
are planned, democracy is a sham, all faces are
masks, all flags are false. Taken to extremes,
the conspiracist style casts doubt on absolutely
everything, even our basic understanding of
reality. Fact becomes fiction and fiction
becomes fact: Universities are purveyors of
state-sponsored lies, while conspiratorial plots
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in films and books are “predictive programming,”
designed to subconsciously prepare us for the
coming New World Order.
“A virtuoso conspiracy theorist turns black
into white and white into black,” wrote Daniel
Pipes. And there is no more skilled virtuoso than
David Icke. “Just look at us,” Icke implores
readers of The David Icke Guide to the Global
Conspiracy (quoting the alternative health
practitioner Michael Ellner). “Everything is
backwards; everything is upside down. Doctors
destroy health, lawyers destroy justice,
universities destroy knowledge, governments
destroy freedom, the major media destroy
information and religions destroy spirituality.”
according to plan. In fact, United 93 didn’t crash
at all. The wreck site in Shanksville was staged.
The phone calls to loved ones from passengers
on the plane were faked. The plane landed at
Cleveland Hopkins Airport, where passengers
were taken to a nearby NASA research facility
and never heard from again. What’s more,
every element of what transpired on September
11 was carefully orchestrated by the United
States government. What the 9/11 Commission
Report described as failures “in imagination,
policy, capabilities, and management” were all,
in fact, part of the meticulously planned ruse.
The world is a complicated place with many
interacting parts. As the fate of Flight 93, not to
mention botched and blown conspiracies like
Watergate or Iran-Contra, go to show, it’s hard
to put together a good conspiracy, and harder
still to stop anyone from screwing it up or
blabbing. That doesn’t stop people from trying,
but even when things go pretty much according
to plan, there are often unforeseen and
unintended consequences. The results
achieved differ, as a general rule, from the
results aimed at.
Things seem a whole lot simpler in the world
according to conspiracy theories. As Daniel
Pipes put it, conspiracy theorists seem to have
“startling faith in the capabilities of their
enemies.” At the very least, they propose that
when the conspirators set events in motion they
are able to predict how things will unfold with
seemingly clairvoyant foresight. The
conspirators are apparently willing and able to
pull together as a team in total obedience to the
conspiracy, almost as if it were a singular
organism rather than a collection of people,
each with his or her own personal ambitions,
scruples, families, hobbies.
At their most extreme, conspiracy theories
propose that the conspirators are virtually
omnipotent. Richard Hofstadter captured this
element of the conspiracist style. “Unlike the
rest of us,” Hofstadter wrote, “the enemy is not
caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of
history, himself a victim of his past, his desires,
his limitations.” On the contrary, “he wills,
indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of
history, or tries to deflect the normal course of
history.” Often the conspiracy is said to exert
total control over some effective source of
power—it controls the media, the economy,
science; it rigs the elections and tampers with
our medicine and food. And the conspiracy is
responsible for all the world’s ills. It “makes
Everything Is Under Control
The plot among nineteen young al-Qaeda
members to hijack commercial airplanes and fly
them into American landmarks is credited with
being the deadliest terrorist attack on American
soil, and it shaped events around the world for
years to come. Yet, as well orchestrated as the
attacks were, the conspiracy didn’t go entirely
according to plan.
United Airlines Flight 93 took off from
Newark Liberty Airport at 8:42 A.M., forty
minutes after its scheduled departure time. It
was the only hijacked plane that was
significantly delayed. Forty-five minutes later,
the four hijackers on board rushed the cockpit,
killed the two pilots and a flight attendant, and
diverted the plane to Washington, D.C. The plan
was to fly the plane into the White House or the
Capitol. Minutes later, at 9:32 A.M., an air traffic
controller in Cleveland heard a transmission
from the cockpit: “Ladies and Gentlemen: Here
the captain, please sit down keep remaining
sitting. We have a bomb on board. So, sit.” The
hijacker apparently thought he was talking to
the plane’s passengers, rather than Air Traffic
Control. By that time, planes had already
crashed into both World Trade Center towers.
Passengers and crew on board Flight 93 began
calling people on the ground from cell phones
and the air phones on the plane, and quickly
learned that America was under attack.
Realizing the hijackers were on a suicide
mission, a group of passengers decided to fight
back. The last thing one passenger told his wife
before hanging up was, “don’t worry, we’re
going to do something.” Minutes later, the plane
crashed into an empty field in Pennsylvania.
But according to some conspiracy theories,
this wasn’t a hitch; everything went exactly
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crises, starts runs on banks, causes
depressions, manufactures disasters, and then
enjoys and profits from the misery” it has
caused. This is a “distinctly personal”
interpretation of history, Hofstadter concluded;
“decisive events are not taken as part of the
stream of history, but as the consequences of
someone’s will.”
There is a caveat, however. The
conspirators are staggeringly competent—
except every now and then when they mess up
just a little bit. Like many conspiracy theories,
the idea that United 93 landed safely in
Cleveland was spawned by a mistaken news
report, hastily repeated in the midst of ongoing
confusion, and quickly retracted when the error
was spotted. As far as the conspiracy theory is
concerned, however, the report was correct all
along, and its retraction is proof of a cover-up.
Portentous slipups like this are the basis of
many conspiracy theories. If the conspiracy
were absolutely perfect, after all, if the
conspirators never let slip a single clue, then
nobody would have any idea what they were up
to. As Loren Collins bluntly explained, the
conspiracy always seems to be “exactly as
competent and powerful as the conspiracy
theorist needs it to be.”
Jones and Griffin are not unusual in their
apocalyptic alarmism. Sensational allegations
have been a central motif of the conspiracist
style, from the antisemitic blood libel to the first
fully fledged conspiracy theories that emerged
in the wake of the French Revolution. “AN
ASSOCIATION HAS BEEN FORMED for the
express purpose of ROOTING OUT ALL THE
RELIGIOUS ESTABLISHMENTS, AND
OVERTURNING ALL THE EXISTING
GOVERNMENTS OF EUROPE,” wrote John
Robison, author of one of the anti-Illuminati
treatises we encountered in Chapter 1 (and
whose liberal use of capitalization to drive home
the scale of his revelations foreshadowed
enraged Internet commenters’ abuse of the
caps-lock key centuries later). Conspiracy can
be necessary and benign. People conspire to
throw surprise parties for their friends.
Intelligence agencies conspire in the interests of
national security (in theory, at least). That said,
cruel and destructive conspiracies are not
uncommon, from plots to bump off a spouse
and cash in on the life insurance policy, to
horrific terrorist atrocities. Secrecy is sometimes
necessary precisely because the deed being
concealed is morally suspect. But even these
kinds of plots tend to be limited in ambition and
scope. Conspiracy scholars Emma Jane and
Chris Fleming aptly sum up the kind of
conspiratorial activity we know about. “As far as
we are aware, we do not live in a world with one
or two powerful conspiracies in operation—but
in one in which millions of minor ones—and
perhaps a few medium ones—are grinding
away all the time.” The majority of real
conspiracies, they add, are “so banal . . . it’s
hardly worth theorizing them.”
The conspiracist style has no time for such
trifles. Conspiracy theories generally feature an
altogether more sinister and ambitious breed of
conspirator. At the very least, the conspirators
are said to have a Machiavellian streak a mile
wide. They “have a prize worth cheating for and
the will and ability to stop at nothing to get it,” as
Joe Uscinski and Joseph Parent put it. A
common refrain among conspiracy theorists is
cui bono?—who benefits? Anyone who stands
to gain from some situation is automatically
suspected of bringing it about. Adding to the
intrigue, the villains often turn out to be the very
individuals and institutions we normally expect
to act in the public interest, such as our
democratically elected leaders, health care
providers, and the media. In many cases,
Everything Is Evil
“It is already possible to know beyond a
reasonable doubt one very important thing: The
destruction of the World Trade Center was an
inside job, orchestrated by domestic terrorists,”
Professor David Ray Griffin told audiences
during a 2005 tour to promote his wildly popular
book The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing
Questions About the Bush Administration and
9/11. “The welfare of our republic and perhaps
even the survival of our civilization depend on
getting the truth about 9/11 exposed,” Griffin
concluded. He received a standing ovation.
Professor Griffin is the soft-spoken,
academic face of the 9/11 Truth movement. Alex
Jones, a gravel-voiced Texan with a nationally
syndicated daily radio show, brings a little more
bravado to the proceedings. Wielding a bullhorn
at a 2006 Truther rally in downtown Chicago,
Jones told passersby, “the government is
carrying out terrorist attacks as a pretext to
reengineer America into a police state. Why? To
capture us to be their political slaves, to use us
as an engine of global empire to invade the
planet. Ladies and gentlemen, 9/11 is an inside
job.”
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vindication of conspiracy theories would justify
the impeachment of whole governments, the
disbandment and criminal prosecution of entire
organizations and industries, and the rewriting
of history.
Taken to extremes, conspiracy theories
become “all-encompassing expressions of
organized evil that leave the political corruption
of Watergate looking like careless playground
fibbing,” as Jane and Fleming pithily put it. We
are not dealing with garden-variety criminals.
Their malevolent ambition goes far beyond
everyday plots born out of self-interest, rivalry,
corruption, cruelty, and criminality. These are
villains who seem to have stepped out of the
pages of a comic book. They are guilty of
causing all the ills from which we suffer,
committing abominable acts of unthinkable
cruelty on a routine basis, and striving ultimately
to subvert or destroy everything we hold dear.
The world according to conspiracy theories is
one of high stakes and moral absolutes. We are
up against Evil Incarnate. “One could ironically
say that [conspiracy theories] brought the Devil
back,” political scientist Paul Zawadzki wrote,
“only this time it was a human Devil.” If this
sounds overblown, just listen to David Ray
Griffin, the soft-spoken academic: “We have
become entranced by demonic power, so
focused on lust for wealth and control that
almost anything becomes possible.”
that a third skyscraper had just collapsed—
World Trade Center Building 7. The only
problem with the report was that Building 7
hadn’t collapsed. In fact, it could be seen in the
background of the shot, over the reporter’s
shoulder, still very much standing. If that had
been the end of the story, the mistaken report
would have probably been long forgotten. But
twenty-six minutes later, at 5:20—and just five
minutes after the reporter’s satellite feed to the
BBC’s London studio had mysteriously cut out—
the building came down.
The premature report of Building 7’s demise
is a typical example of the sort of evidence
conspiracy theories are built on. As far as the
official story is concerned, the report is of no
real significance one way or another. Things
were confusing in Lower Manhattan, the
building was known to be in bad condition, and
the report of its collapse was simply a mistake.
According to some conspiracy theories,
however, the report is far from irrelevant to our
understanding of the 9/11 attacks; it is evidence.
Anomalies like this—seemingly odd details that
the official story can’t immediately account for—
are the lifeblood of conspiracy theories. Each
small oddity sets in motion a chain of reasoning
that inexorably leads to the conclusion that the
whole thing was a conspiracy. The mistaken
report about Building 7, according to the
conspiracy theories, suggests that the BBC
knew what was about to happen, and the
reporter got ahead of the script—one of those
minor hiccups in an otherwise flawless
conspiracy. And if the collapse of Building 7 was
preordained, the Twin Towers must have been
scripted to fall as well, which means the entire
ordeal was meticulously planned from the getgo.
As philosopher Brian Keeley has pointed
out, by weaving every niggling anomaly into a
grand unifying theory, conspiracy theories can
look stronger than the official stories by sheer
virtue of completeness. Conspiracy theories
“always explain more than competing theories,
because by invoking a conspiracy, they can
explain both the data of the received account
and the errant data that the received theory fails
to explain.” But this apparent virtue, Keeley
argues, is an illusion. You can find anomalies
everywhere if you look hard enough. Our
understanding of complex events will always
contain errors, contradictions, and gaps. History
is messy, people are fallible. “Given the
imperfect nature of our human understanding of
Anomaly Hunting
Richard Hofstadter noted the “heroic
strivings” with which conspiracy theorists amass
evidence in favor of their claims. “Conspiracy
theorists do not see themselves as raconteurs
of alluring stories,” Jovan Byford notes, “but as
investigators and researchers.” There are entire
cottage industries devoted to the Kennedy
assassination, the 9/11 attacks, and endless
other conspiracy theories. The most committed
conspiracists possess an intricate knowledge of
their subject, often far in excess of their
debunkers. If you’ve ever debated a devoted
9/11 Truther, you may have been regaled with
an endless list of facts and arguments
ostensibly pointing toward conspiracy as the
only possi
