Tinfoil Revolution
of BuzzFeed offers a glimpse into the workings of a right-wing conspiracy theory:
The unhinged conspiracy theory now known as “Pizzagate” has resulted in a man bringing an assault rifle to the DC bar named in the theory, according to local police.
“Pizzagate” claims that Democratic operatives placing orders at Comet Ping Pong were actually using code to talk about underage prostitutes.
This strange and convoluted conspiracy theory, which also involves allegations of occult rituals, has its origins in false accusations about the Clintons that began spreading in late October. The original theory claimed that the Clintons and other government figures were involved in a global human trafficking and pedophilia ring.
This one example shows how Trump supporters, members of 4chan and Reddit, and right-wing blogs in the US and in other countries combined to create and spread viral misinformation during the election season.
Here’s what happened ....
What we have is a New York Lawyer, on 30 October, tweeting a Facebook message from someone in Missouri claiming inside sources at NYPD; neither lawyer nor source wanted to talk to BuzzFeed about their posts. Shortly thereafter, an accusation was posted to a group called Godlike Productions. The next day a known conspiracy theorist claims an FBI contact said the evidence was in Anthony Weiner's computer. Silverman notes: "Where did this this new FBI source come from? Adl-Tabatabai cited a thread on a 4chan message board from back in July." Or:
OK, let’s do a quick recap. At this point we have:
• One random account on Twitter and a woman in Missouri claiming that NYPD sources are telling them the Clintons are about to be brought down by a massive child trafficking/sex scandal.
• An anonymous person in a 4chan thread who claimed to work in law enforcement and who said something similar a few months ago — before news of the FBI looking into emails on Anthony Weiner’s laptop broke.
• A conspiracy theorist who pulled these things into a post and used them to claim “evidence has emerged from the Clinton email investigation that a massive child trafficking and pedophile sex ring operates in Washington.”
What don’t we have? Any actual evidence of any of the above, or information from the FBI, NYPD, or any other officials.
From there it was just a matter of leaving it to the echo chamber:
For example, one site plagiarized the text from Adl-Tabatabai’s post and their version has racked up over 85,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook. (Adl-Tabatabai’s post has just over 23,000 Facebook interactions to date.)
The claims were also soon picked up by at least two (1,2) pro-Trump websites run by young men in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. As detailed in a recent BuzzFeed News report, there are more than 100 of these websites operating in one small town. They aggregate sensationalized and often false pro-Trump content from US conservative sites in order to attract a US audience and earn money from ads.
While many sites simply repeated the details from Adl-Tabatabai, others introduced new, baseless claims. SubjectPolitics.com ran a story with the headline “IT’S OVER: NYPD Just Raided Hillary’s Property! What They Found Will RUIN HER LIFE.” Er no, the NYPD did *not* raid property belonging to Hillary Clinton.
And I don't really know quite how to describe the disparity, but in my own life I know someone who generally claims adherence to the scientific method, though we all recognize that's a strange formulation. But here's the catch: He likes to say it that way because he has something against non-scientific information. That is to say, falsehood is fine, as long as it's not "science". Romanticizing white supremacism? Why not, since it doesn't actually say "white supremacism"? (Try the same trick with "creationism" and "intelligent design", and he'll notice.) And while his particular information filter is distinct, I don't think his general phenomenon is rare. Despite his belief in math and science, truth is what he wants it to be, and even when he knows it's not true he thinks it has a place in the discussion because, you know, it's not math. It's a manner of excluding and invalidating records he doesn't want to deal with; as I said, not rare. Thus, a Hillary child sex ring? Why not?
In my lifetime American society went from tolerating a few bad seeds pushing falsehood in order to cause harm, to trying to find a safe space for them to create danger for others, to electing them a president. When I was young, it was offensive, even
anti-American, to describe our society according to certain recent outcomes. If I told a Reagan Republican of the day, as Poppy Bush's presidency waned, what to expect of the GOP over the next quarter-century, not only would they not believe me, the proposition would also have offended. And not
just Republican sentiments; their people, also.
Just try describing
Dick Cheney: A vice-president will, upon being known to have met to fashion energy policy with energy brokers who blew up the economy mismanaging their company claim executive privilege to hide the record, but then, when faced with executive orders for archiving his office's work, claim to be part of the legislative branch in order to slip an executive order pertaining to the executive branch. Just tell a 1992 Republican that. Tell a 1988 Republican that Poppy Bush would get one term, and then Republicans would descend into a fever swamp of attacking the children of presidents. Those conservatives and working-class "Reagan Democrats" would have been offended.
When history pens the tale of how we went from the
Party of Reagan↱ to the
Party of Trump↱―nor is it easy, right now, to demarcate, except for the declaration that Republicans no longer belong to the Party of Reagan―one of the vital subplot arcs will follow what
Michael Lind↱ described, over twenty years ago, as the "collapse of intellectual conservatism". And it will have something to do with the Reagan Awakening of the evangelical vote, because Republicans and the nation alike have been paying for that unfortunate bargain with less than reputable players ever since. A conspiracy theory coming through your ranting uncle is a conspiracy theory. A conspiracy theory coming through the pastor and his conventional quasi-divine authority is more legitimized. And let's face it, the paranoid sectors of Christian faith solely concerned with their own salvation are a fine place to breed all manner of antisocial conspiracy theory. Anti-Catholic, anti-UN, anti-science ... there is even one―I shite thee not―accusing
Catholics,
Marxists, and
Witches of conspiring to bring about George H.W. Bush's New World Order. (It's widely known in Seventh Day-Adventist,
i.e., Ben Carson's, circles;
cf., Malachi Martin,
The Keys of This Blood, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990.) But, yeah, if I had told you the Pope is the Devil because I was a politically passionate teenager who disdained conservative speech codes, conservative conduct codes, and conservative supremacism, all of which we get from the Vatican from time to time, that's beyond the pale. But if I'm a conservative Christian pastor denouncing the devilish Mary cult from my pulpit, well, that's the thing. At what point―and why―would this rhetoric escalate from the feverish nightmares we are to politely ignore to the feverish nightmare we should elect?
This happened for any number of reasons, and there is irony that, as we now are expected to sublimate white supremacist identity politics as a national economic narrative purportedly having nothing to do with race―once again, we don't address underlying issues until white people say it's okay, and they only seem to say it's okay if everyone else is to remain subordinate to white males―part of how the white working class has arrived in its unfortunate circumstance is that they voted for it.
And it is the strangest ideological arc, because there is continuity that can only be doubted―well, essentially arbitrarily―because one says so, because it is convenient to do so.
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Notes:
Silverman, Craig. "How The Bizarre Conspiracy Theory Behind 'Pizzagate' Was Spread". BuzzFeed. 5 December 2016. BuzzFeed.com. http://bzfd.it/2gxhDVa
Lind, Michael. "Why Intellectual Conservatism Died". Dissent. Winter, 1995. DissentMagazine.org. http://bit.ly/2aaQc1D
(Edit: Syntax [6 Dec. 2016, 12.51 PT])
