Are Americans more prone to believing conspiracy theories than they used to be? I was prowling around looking for something else when Alex Tabarrok sent me a link to a paper that happened to contain this chart. I have extended it to include the belief that the 2020 election was stolen:
The belief in election fraud is high, but hardly unprecedented. In fact, given that Fox News, the president of the United States, and half of Congress spent months blanketing the airwaves with accusations of fraud, it might even be considered sort of moderate.
In any case, it doesn't appear that there's any secular increase in the American belief in conspiracy theories, and there's other evidence that points in the same direction. Just thought you might be interested.
A couple of days ago, I learned that my college-educated niece believes the IRS is a private corporation, not a government agency, and that it has no legal authority to collect income taxes -- based on a crackpot documentary that was made years ago.
In my prior job, I received letters from all sorts of tax protesters who floated all sorts of insane ideas along these lines. Less than five minutes on Google can show just how insane the ideas are.
It's the hazard of having so much information out there on the information superhighway -- those who want to believe will find something to support their beliefs, no matter how lunatic.
The Bush administration did in fact mislead the country into war, so you can throw that data point out.
Yes.
Yes, also.
Triple yes
Can't wait for the "partisan conspiracy theories" we'll be hearing about the Trump administration in a few years. That he tried to overturn an election. That he caged kids at the border. That he coddled dictators. "Can you believe people actually believed an American president did those things?"
Remember when Trump appointed a foreign agent as National Security Advisor, and then pardoned him, and then campaigned with him, and then he told Trump to impose martial law.
Even today nobody believes it.
WWGTWGA.*
*When We Go Treason, We Go All.
I agree. And their lies (e.g., Condoleezza Rice on the aluminum tubes) were contested at the time, but the Bush administration was so eager to go to war (and shamefully supported in that desire by a variety of journalists — George Packer, Mike Keller, Jonah Goldberg, et al.) that nothing could hold them back. James Fallows presciently warned about the (negative) impact the war would have, and even wrote a long piece in the Atlantic about it (on Iraq as draining US resources).
At least Mike Kelley died doing what he loved.
Mourn ye til I join ye, brother.
The key word here is purposely. They were high on their own supply -- they believed their bullshit -- which takes the purposefully mislead out of the picture. They were convinced that what they were selling was true, in spite of evidence to the contrary.
No they didn't. That's horse shit. In order to believe it they would have needed at least some evidence.
People have an amazing ability to ignore evidence which is contrary to their deeply held beliefs. They did mislead, the question is about purposefully. Blind spots, ie. they knew they were lying and did it anyway, is different from dismissing evidence contrary to your priors.
Cheney had Judith Miller publish a story about the aluminum tubes being used as missiles. There were misleading stories about Iraq seeking uranium yellow cake, and on an on.
A problem with this list is that it is imprecise. There is a difference between claiming there was a cabal of government agents that planted explosives to take down the World Trade Center vs being skeptical about the public explanation.
No, the Bush Administration’s claim was that the tubes were intended for use in gas centrifuges for the purpose of enriching uranium to bomb-grade. The alternative explanation was that they were casings for artillery rockets (81 mm dis, about 3.2 in.). Iraq’s only known centrifuge design, which apparently was only ever prototyped, not built in quantity, was about twice that diameter (Wikipedia). The claim was that the tubes were an exotic alloy. I have scrap pieces of the stuff, 7075-T6, lying around my workshop.
I'm not sure if I interpret that graph the way that you do.
Except for the MLK shooting, the belief that Biden stole the election has the highest proportion of believers since 1975.
The only two "conspiracy theories" that are comparable were that FDR knew the attack against were coming and that Bush knowingly misled the country about Iraq having WMDs.
Now I happen to think these two theories are false, but whether FDR knew about Pearl Harbor in advance was a matter of legitimate historical debate in 1991. So, too, are Bush's actions today.
I guess those technically qualify as conspiracy theories, but it seems wrong to compare plausible interpretations of historical events with rank nonsense.
It's my understanding that news of Pearl Harbor reached intel in Hawaii, but they thought a flash alert to Washington would alert the Japanese, so they sent it through normal channels and the attack happened before the news reached Washington.
I don't know if Bush knowingly misled the country, but the Bush Administration did. That's not a conspiracy theory.
And if the movies are correct, the Japanese ambassador was supposed to deliver a declaration of war before the attack, but their timing was off.
What they taught us in school is that the Japanese embassy could not decode it fast enough.
Following the American embargo of oil and scrap metal exports to Japan, FDR and military intelligence were well aware the Japanese were getting ready to strike and actually put out a "war warning". Where it all went wrong was the assumption the attack would be on the Philippines, and that the Japanese would never be audacious enough to strike at Pearl Harbor.
This is a pretty loose conception of a 'conspiracy theory'. Believing Obama was born in Kenya isn't a belief in a conspiracy, it's simply believing a lie because it suits your prejudices. Believing the Bush Administration misrepresented the intelligence about WMDs for political purposes isn't belief in a conspiracy; it's a valid interpretation of publicly available information for which there is considerable evidence. Trump ranting that the election was rigged isn't a conspiracy theory; it's just Trump being off his head. Believing a plane was brought down by a military accident is a belief in a cover-up, not a conspiracy to shoot down the plane.
The chart really demonstrates nothing more than the propensity of people to believe things that either aren't true, or are wildly implausible. True conspiracy theories are developed narratives which seek to explain events by reference to the planned controlling actions of sinister secret groups of malevolent actors trying to achieve an evil goal. Believing there's no global warming isn't a conspiracy theory; it's just a refusal to accept evidence. The conspiracy theory is that "scientists" have deliberately falsified data for years in order to get lots of lovely research grants, or even to help bring about that one socialist world government the faceless left dreams about.
Most conspiracy theories are about the cover up of climate change by the fossil fuel globalist. Which is also true.
I will alert Carol in HR.
Bush lying about Iraq is a conspiracy theory, but it happens to be true. It's a theory about a real conspiracy.
I have a problem with most of the "conspiracies" in that list. They're more like speculation built on top of a handful of facts, which, after examination, can either be proven or disproven.
Punditry has gone into overdrive lately, claiming speculation is conspiracist thinking, never mind that half of the punditry on TV on both the left and right indulge in speculation with a limited set of facts. If the speculation is on the other side of the aisle, it must be conspiracy thinking?
I think the real issue we're facing is an unwillingness to accept whether a speculative theory has been either proven or disproven.
Seems to me that over a third of the country believing that the government is illegitimate is pretty terrible and reason to be very worried about the future, but if Kevin Drum says it's not a big deal, then...
I think that is people who think Trump cheated, is in that group.
de Joy crippled the post office to slow mail in votes and Trump tried to suborn election fraud among officials from several states, so maybe the number should be higher.
You will never convince me Louis de Joy & Gordon Sondlund aren't the same dude, either.
Yeah, I’d say believing nebulous conspiracy theories about assassinations of political figures is hugely different than believing the government is illegitimate. I’d also suggest that the partisan nature of these conspiracies is cause for concern. That 33% of the population represents a majority of Republicans. Having a majority of one of the major parties believing in a clearly bogus conspiracy seems a bit concerning, to say the least.
Big Mason energy.
My sister and her two children had tickets to be on flight 800. She had a last minute change of plans and went on a different flight. Hard to even think about.
dear heaven!
There does seem to be some evidence that a US Navy (which was conducting missile tests in the area above which the plane flew) accidentally fired a missile that destroyed Flight 800. It's easy to find the evidence discussed on-line, and Pierre Salinger flatly admitted it. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/us-navy-missile-hit-twa-800-ex-kennedy-aide-1.103900
Likewise, we know Cheney ordered the shootdown of flight 93, and there were witnesses who heard an explosion before the plane crashed (maybe the terrorists had a bomb?).
How would Pierre Salinger, former press secretary for JFK, have known about that?
Because it was a test run to shoot down John-John's plane.
He was planning to challenge Shrillary for Moynihan's Senate seat.
Big Final Destination energy.
Excuse me, 2003?
As I recall that was open warfare on the internet, not a conspiracy theory.
We might remember Political Animal itself was a bomb crater.
The House Select Committee on Assassinations in their final 1979 report concluded that James Earl Ray probably assassinated Dr King for money and there was a likelihood of conspiracy in the assassination of Dr King. The report points to southern white supremacist groups as the likely conspirators.
Ray was a very small time thief. It has never been explained where Ray got the money for the Mustang he was driving after breaking out of prison or the facial reconstruction surgery he underwent one month before the assassination. It has also never been explained where Ray got the money to flee to Toronto, Canada for a month and obtain a real Canadian birth certificate in the name of a dead man of about his age which he used to get a passport. He then flew to London and Lisbon, Portugal before returning to London. After a month in Toronto and a month in Europe he finally started to run out of money and turned to small robberies shortly before he was caught at the London airport.
To me the facial reconstruction surgery and the quality of the fake IDs he obtained in Toronto all suggest the assassination was part of a conspiracy.
Moon landing??? Oh please!
Magic bullets and grassy knolls....c'mon!
/s
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Yeah, funny the Kennedy assassination. as the most widely-believed theory, is not on the list. It's a conspiracy!
MLK assassination conspiracy? Don't they mean JFK? Given that the vast majority of Americans probably can't even name King's killer (James Earl Ray) off the top of their heads, but everyone knows Lee Harvey Oswald, my guess is that the question tripped people up in the survey and they were thinking JFK when they answered.
As for the rest of them, as others have pointed out, the idea that the Bush administration used lies about WMDs to push the country into war with Iraq isn't a bizarre conspiracy theory -- it's basically what happened, backed up by reams and reams of investigative reporting over the years.
The main thing to keep in mind with conspiracy theories is that, especially the more elaborate they are, the more the assumptions you have to make about how the scheme was actually executed and then successfully covered up get increasingly ludicrous. It amounts to magical thinking about human institutions and governments. To the conspiratorially-minded, they are at once completely incompetent and frail, yet capable of successfully pulling off the most sophisticated schemes to achieve...I don't know, some kind of global supremacy or something? It all collapses under the weight of its own (il)logic.
It is time to use the word "conspiracy theory" correctly. Of the above list of 13 items no. 1, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11 and 13 (no Oxford comma for me!) are in fact conspiracy theories. The others (2, 3, 6, 7 and 12) are simple lies--except for number 9 which is a proven fact as has already been pointed out.
A very bad list, as others point out. In fact there are good grounds for thinking the MLK assassination involved a conspiracy and there is no doubt that the Bush administration deliberately misled the public about Iraqi WMD (and involvement of Hussein in 9/11) - it was their claims that were improbable, not the belief that the administration was exaggerating or misrepresenting the evidence.
Both the Bush/Cheney Iraq invasion propaganda and the allegations of vote fraud in 2020 were deliberate campaigns by those in power, not "conspiracy theories" that arose spontaneously or because of any real doubt about events. Such things are especially dangerous, and it is dismaying that so many people, including people in the media who should know better, bought into the Bush/Cheney propaganda. Although it is doubtful that many Republican politicians actually believe the vote-fraud allegations most of them consider that they have to go along for partisan reasons. There has never been any evidence for vote fraud - this was just a bald-faced lie from the beginning. Whether people are more prone to believe "conspiracy theories" or not, it is disturbing that Republicans seem more inclined to rely on mass disinformation campaigns that are getting more and more detached from reality.
The chart data source is the American Enterprise Institute. Apply appropriate skepticism.
I actually have one belief (maybe suspicion is a better word) that may or may not seem like a conspiracy theory, I dunno. I'd be interested in getting an idea if others also think this way.
Anyway, I think it's entirely possible, even likely, that the last plane that went down on 9/11 ("Flight 93" was actually shot down intentionally, by the military, to prevent it from reaching DC. I can't even say that I'd necessarily object to that decision, if that was in fact what occurred.
I would add to the above, which I don't know enough about to have an opinion, that I have no doubt at all that WTC7 came down as a controlled demolition.
All the best conspiracy theories contain a few kernels of truth!