Conspiracy
Click on Book for Amazon
Conspiracy theories are explanations for events that invoke secret, sinister plots by powerful groups, often ignoring more probable evidence. They function to provide simple, definitive answers to complex, anxiety-inducing events, reinforcing, rather than challenging, existing biases. Historically, these theories have driven prejudice, propaganda, and severe real-world violence.
As the nation recovers from the Trump presidency, many questions remain: Why was the COVID-19 pandemic so grossly mishandled? How did we get so politically polarized? What caused white nationalist groups to come out of the shadows, and are they here to stay?
The answers lie the twisted story of the relationship between Donald Trump and Fox News.
A revealing trip down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories -their appeal, who believes them, how they spread -with an eye to helping people deal with the alt-right conspiracists in their own lives.Conspiracy theories are killing us. Once confined to the fringes of society, this worldview now has adherents numbering in the millions -extending right into the White House.
A fresh, persuasive and deeply disturbing overview of the baleful and dangerous impact on the nation of widely disseminated false speech on social media. Richard Hasen, the country's leading expert about election law, has written this book with flair and clarity."—Floyd Abrams, author of The Soul of the First Amendment.
Stelter, Brian. Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth (p. 2). Atria/One Signal Publishers. Kindle Edition. x
Prologue
On March 26, 2020, the people of the United States desperately needed a leader. Instead, they got Donald Trump and Sean Hannity. The day began with a dreaded round number: 1,000 confirmed deaths from the novel coronavirus. Every six minutes another American died from the disease, and everyone knew the true number was even higher, since many died at home without being tested. By nighttime, the official death toll reached 1,195. The suffering was most pronounced in Trump’s hometown, Queens, New York, at Elmhurst Hospital Center, where sick residents lined up in the cold and prayed for a chance to see a doctor. Elmhurst was already out of beds, and would soon be out of ventilators too. The hallways were jammed with patients who could barely stand or say their own names. The scene was far worse than any of the vague, hopeful pablum issued by the White House would have led you to believe, and that’s why two young doctors risked their jobs to alert the public. Dr. Colleen Smith filmed inside the hospital on her iPhone and sent the video to The New York Times. Her colleague Dr. Ashley Bray told a Times reporter of the “apocalyptic” atmosphere as patient after patient died despite heroic efforts. Bray’s description on page one of the March 26 edition marked a turning point in the public’s understanding of the crisis. despite heroic efforts. But the president didn’t read the story. Months earlier, he’d proudly claimed that he canceled the White House’s subscriptions to the Times. Whenever the paper published a painfully true critique of the administration, Trump and his media allies at Fox News claimed the Times was “fake” and “failing.” But the beleaguered and shrinking pool of committed journalists at Fox knew that was a lie. They wished sources like Bray and Smith would call them instead of the Times, but they knew the misconduct of their prime time peers made that impossible.
Neiwert, David. Red Pill, Blue Pill: How to Counteract the Conspiracy Theories That Are Killing Us (p. vii). Globe Pequot. Kindle Edition.
Prologue
They call it “getting red-pilled.” We all know the metaphor, the one from The Matrix: Morpheus holds out his hands to reveal two small pills: “You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” Like the hypercool hero Neo in the films, true believers in the alternative universe of conspiracy theories are absolutely convinced that the epistemological bubble into which they have submerged themselves is the real reality. The problem, of course, is that their version of reality isn’t based in facts, sound evidence, or even logical reasoning, but rather is a complex farrago of conjecture, false facts and evidence, wild-eyed paranoia, and sociopathic authoritarianism. Rather than giving people who think they have “taken the red pill” a clear-eyed view of the world as it really is, conspiracism actually creates a crackpot version of reality in which the world is secretly run by a cabal of scheming Jewish globalists who control both the banks and the media, in which their planned one-world government is intent on disarming private citizens and putting them in concentration camps and in which Muslims work in cahoots with Marxists to destroy Western civilization. It used to be that such people were few in number and mostly relegated to the fringes of society, their theories and claims the frequent source of amusement for some people. Now, the leading conspiracy theorists have audiences numbering in the millions, and their views are shared not just with the audiences on mainstream right-wing cable shows, but also by the president of the United States and members of his administration.
Hasen, Richard L.. Cheap Speech: How Disinformation Poisons Our Politics—and How to Cure It (p. 10). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
Introduction
Clear and Present Danger. The greatest spreader of election disinformation in the 2020 U.S. presidential election season was not a group of Russian hackers operating out of a boiler room in St. Petersburg or a shady political operative deploying anonymous Twitter bots. It was the president of the United States, Donald J. Trump. Trump’s spreading over social media of the “Big Lie” that he had won an election he actually had lost decisively to Joe Biden led to the January 6, 2021, invasion of the U.S. Capitol and violent insurrection by Trump supporters just as Congress was in the middle of confirming Biden’s victory in the Electoral College. The invasion put the lives of Vice President Mike Pence and the congressional leadership in danger, and it left 4 Trump supporters dead and 146 law enforcement officers injured. One officer died of apparent natural causes a day after being sprayed with chemicals by protesters, two died by suicide shortly after the insurrection, and two more died by suicide by mid-August 2021. A slightly more successful operation causing the death of American political leadership could have resulted in political upheaval, led to possible military intervention in the transfer of power, and brought down American democracy itself.