Truth Decay: The Chronic Pandemic

Conspiracy theories used to be relatively harmless, provocative dinner table conversation and the focus of action movie plots. But that is no longer the case. Now believing conspiracy theories can destroy minds, get people fired or even killed — like believing that a virus that infects millions is fake news — or, at the very least, cause confusion and havoc.

A day after conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer visited the Oval Office last week, for example, President Trump fired five NSC staffers, apparently in response. Loomer, an extremist social media star with a history of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim statements, told Trump he was having a “vetting crisis” that had allowed disloyal advisors through the door. Several years back, in Florida, she handcuffed herself to a Twitter office after being banned from the site and also jumped a fence at a home owned by Nancy Pelosi.

Before Trump recaptured the presidency, the FBI — at times the focus of considerable theorizing — called “conspiracy theory-driven domestic extremists” associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory a “domestic terror threat.” Now QAnon ideas drive federal policies. Also known as The Storm, it began as a secretive network that believed in a deep state conspiracy against President Trump, and also in Pizzagate, a related theory that a pedophile ring including Clinton associates was run out of the basement of a Washington, D.C. pizza restaurant — which didn’t actually have a basement.

From the start, QAnon’s advocates and supporters were linked to multiple threats, attempted acts of violence, even murders. Trump nevertheless amplified its messages, over and over, on Twitter. Just days before destroying part of downtown Nashville and killing himself, the Christmas Day bomber sent packages containing writings and videos promoting QAnon-based theories to multiple people.

In October 2017,  QAnon jumped to the mainstream in the form of shirts and signs that were prominently visible at a Trump campaign rally in Tampa, Florida. After that President Trump met with several supporters of QAnon at the White House. One co-chaired a coalition group for his reelection campaign, and several were elected to Congress. In 2021, they challenged the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election. Loomer is an avid, long-term QAnon advocate.

By 2022, Elon Musk had officially joined their ranks. Even before he bought Twitter and fully unleashed its toxic potential, he used the platform to accuse a critic of being a “pedo guy.” That led to a lawsuit, but the jury sided with Musk. After Twitter became X, his descent continued. When a QAnon supporter broke into the home of Nancy Pelosi and violently attacked her husband, Musk promoted the false idea that the hammer attack was some kind of gay sex incident.

Do more people buy into conspiracies today? Probably. Yet for most of the last 50 years, between 60% and 80% of the country has believed in some form of JFK conspiracy theory. They’re not all “conspiracy nuts.”

On the other hand, conspiracy thinking has crossed over — initially with some foreign help — from Internet chat groups to mainstream news coverage. For example, a Yahoo News podcast, aptly named “Conspiracyland,” revealed that Russia’s foreign intelligence service was the origin of a hoax report that tied the murder of Seth Rich, a Democratic National Committee staffer, to Hillary Clinton. Washington police concluded that Rich was killed in a botched robbery. There was no proof that his murder had any political connections. Yet millions of people believed there were.

Among the violent conspiracy theories cited by the FBI before Trump’s 2024 re-election was one involving a man who thought Transportation Security Administration agents were part of a New World Order elite. Another focused on the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), a government-funded facility in Alaska that was linked to everything from death beams to mind control. Whatever the truth about HAARP, two men were arrested in 2019 for “stockpiling weapons, ammunition and other tactical gear in preparation to attack” the Alaska facility. They believed it was being used “to control the weather and prevent humans from talking to God.”

In response to the spread of conspiracy-motivated violence, the FBI began applying the same radicalization analysis it had used against foreign terrorism. They claimed to focus on ideological motives. But as the number of communities included in the “extremist” category expanded, mass surveillance also expanded and it became increasingly hard to tell which conspiracies to give credibility.

Not all such theories are dangerous. Even the FBI has admitted that. Some may even be accurate. But others lead to attempted or successful violent attacks. The Pizzagate conspiracy led a 28-year-old man to invade a Washington, D.C., restaurant to rescue the children he believed were being kept there and fire an assault-style weapon. Elon Musk has helped to keep that false narrative alive.

Or take the related, overarching Deep State conspiracy theory. The FBI cited an unnamed California man, arrested in December 2018 after being found with what appeared to be bomb-making materials in his car. He was allegedly planning to “blow up a satanic temple monument” in the Capitol rotunda in Springfield, Illinois. Why? To “make Americans aware of Pizzagate and the New World Order, who are dismantling society.”

The FBI’s intelligence analysis never mentioned Alex Jones or InfoWars by name. But it did cite some of the conspiracy theories frequently associated with him, especially the New World Order theory. Jones also claimed the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, in which 26 children were killed, was a hoax, a false flag operation intended as a pretext for the government to seize or outlaw firearms. The families of a number of victims successfully sued Jones for defamation, saying his conspiracy mongering contributed to death threats and online abuse.

Following the conspiracy trail a bit further, you eventually come to Trump, who has promoted numerous fringe theories. Here’s a short list: He has often talked about the Deep State, and frequently retweeted output from QAnon before and after his 2016 election. He was the godfather of Spygate, which alleged that Obama and others wiretapped him, and a big pusher of the voter impersonation lie; that is, the existence of millions of phantom voters. There was also white genocide theory, baked into his output, and of course, the Obama citizenship theory — which launched the movement that fueled his first presidential candidacy.

But the FBI never investigated Trump for peddling conspiracies — no matter who they hurt — even after he was out of power between 2021 and 2024. Instead, Michael C. McGarrity, then the FBI’s assistant director of the counterterrorism division, told Congress that the bureau classified domestic terrorism threats into four main categories: racially motivated violent extremism; anti-government/anti-authority extremism; animal rights/environmental extremism, and abortion extremism, used to classify pro-choice and anti-abortion extremists.

More than a decade ago, the most successful right wing conspiracy theory involved Obama as a secret Muslim. Before Trump piled on, millions of people already believed that. They also accepted that secular humanists wanted to repress religion, and that liberals were plotting to confiscate people’s guns and push a “gay agenda.” All of that set the context for Trump’s first election win.

Since his return to power this year, circulating false stories and narratives has become even more common, often justifying draconian policies. Trump’s administration has circulated the idea that USAID secretly bribed news outlets for pro-Democratic Party coverage and that FEMA has wasted millions on luxury hotels for migrants. Since becoming Health Secretary, RFK Jr. has continued to promote dangerous theories about the effects of childhood vaccines.

In February, Trump issued an executive order cutting off aid to South Africa and granting asylum to the country’s white minority because, he claimed, a land reform law there allowed the seizure of “ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation” and fueled “violence against racially disfavored landowners.” In reality, the law only allows seizure when a property is abandoned and usually requires “just and equitable” compensation.

In late March, Trump ended Secret Service protection for Joe Biden’s adult children after a report from Laura Loomer featured photos of Hunter Biden with a protective detail in South Africa.

 The idea that 9/11 was an inside job — and all that entails — initially developed at the left end of the ideological spectrum. But it has since been embraced by Loomer and other right-wing conspiracists. On the first 2021 broadcast of “Meet the Press,” Chuck Todd raised that theory from the conspiracy graveyard, comparing it to Sen. Ron Johnson’s false allegations about election fraud.

Yet, despite the fact that conspiracy theories can be dangerous distractions, or deliberate deceptions, some are worth consideration, as long as we keep in mind that they aren’t necessarily 100% accurate, and resist exaggerations or total buy-in. After all, a number of open conspiracies and related false narratives do pose a real danger as incitements to violence.

The problem is that it has become difficult to tell the difference between the merely strange and the truly dangerous in an era when facts have been so seriously devalued. There are so many possibilities, the standard of proof has been seriously degraded, and the theories tend to evolve, expand and mutate in unexpected ways as they circulate. There is also often little follow up to see whether new facts reinforce or discredit a particular theory. Such ideas are sticky, but the corrections usually aren’t.

For more than a decade, corruption of truth has been contributing to social division and civic decay. Yet there are few consequences for peddling paranoia, intentionally confusing speculation with fact, or perpetrating a premeditated hoax. Instead, more actors weaponize these things to expand or hold onto power. The next step could be to use growing protests of Trump and Musk as a pretext to justify a violent police state response. 

Until now, accountability has been hard to get for the false prophets, opportunists, and irresponsible rumor-mongers — many of them now in positions of authority and power — who threaten societies with truth decay. But at least we are beginning to understand who more of them are.

Dawn of the Decadent

Christopher Lasch and our culture of narcissism 

An excerpt from Witness to the Fall

Long before Donald Trump’s malignant narcissism plunged the United States and the world into a hall of mirrors, thought leaders like Christopher Lasch warned about an emerging psychic assault on humanity and a breakdown of culture.

Most of the population has been reduced to incompetence by professional elites, Lasch charged in a controversial book, The Culture of Narcissism, while the family is simultaneously being undermined by advanced capitalism. The personality itself is under attack, he argued, by bureaucracy, a therapeutic culture, and “the domination of our whole experience by fabricated images.”

As Michiko Kakutani explained in his 2019 book, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump, Lasch was ahead of his time in defining narcissism as a “defensive reaction to social change and instability.” A cynical “ethic of self-preservation and psychic survival” afflicted the nation, Lasch believed. It was the symptom of a country grappling at the time with defeat in Vietnam, growing pessimism, a media culture centered on fame and celebrity, and “centrifugal forces that were shrinking the role families played in the transmission of culture.”

Shortly before Lasch helped President Jimmy Carter write his memorable, televised “malaise” speech in 1979 (Carter didn’t actually use the word), I taped and published an interview with the historian about his analysis of contemporary society. “It’s almost as if we can’t experience things directly anymore,” he explained, more than a decade before the Internet went public.

“Something only becomes real when it’s recorded in the form of a photographic image, a recording of the human voice, or whatever. The result is that our whole perception is colored, and I think it has a mirror-like effect. People find it difficult to establish a sense of self unless it’s reflected back in the reaction of others or in the form of images.”

In The Culture of Narcissism, Lasch extended the word’s definition to include “dependence on the vicarious warmth provided by others combined with a fear of dependence, a sense of inner emptiness, boundless repressed rage, and unsatisfied oral cravings.” He also added secondary traits like “pseudo self-insight, calculated seductiveness, nervous self-deprecating humor… intense fear of old age and death, altered sense of time, fascination with celebrity, fear of competition, decline of play spirit, deteriorating relations between men and women.”

Even more disturbing, he asserted that the narcissistic personality was ideally suited for positions of power, a callous, superficial climber who sells him or herself to win at any price.

Today, all of this rings like a prediction about the shape of political leaders to come.

Since Lasch also argued that capitalism was part of the problem, specifically by turning the selling of oneself into a form of work, I asked him to explain. “Capitalism takes bureaucratic form,” he said. “Advancement and success depends upon the ability to project one’s personality and to project a winning image, rather than competence in any given job. Your own personality becomes the principal resource to be marketed.” More than 40 years later, this sounds very much like the Trump-ist mindset.

Mass media were largely responsible, Lasch said, since they create both a sense of “chronic tension” and a “cynical detachment” from reality. And it wasn’t just the advertisements. “By treating everything as parody, a lot of TV shows reflect the same distancing techniques,” he explained. “Everything is a put-on, a take-off. And nothing is to be taken altogether seriously. We now have a whole genre that parodies other popular forms, creating a kind of endless hall of mirrors effect. It becomes very difficult to distinguish reality from images. Finally, the distinction collapses altogether.”

Somewhat depressed by this diagnosis, I tried to refocus on the bright side by asking about the difference between the debilitating detachment he had described and a more healthy skepticism.

“A person could even experience both reactions at different times,” Lasch replied. “This raises a very important political question too, because the thrust of institutions might have a very healthy political effect in reducing people’s dependence on big organizations, making people more willing to solve their own problems. But, on the other hand, it has so far expressed itself as a crippling cynicism in the whole political process: no change is possible at all, and all politicians are corrupt.”

Worse yet, he asserted that the modern American family promoted the development of narcissistic people. Many mothers are no longer confident of their ability to raise children, he said, and many fathers no longer have work that provides an example to follow. “The atrophy of older traditions of self-help has eroded everyday competence in one area after another and has made the individual dependent on the state, the corporation, and other bureaucracies. Narcissism represents the psychological dimension of this dependence.”

Popular culture feeds as a parasite on the narcissist’s primitive fantasies, Lasch continued. It encourages delusions of omnipotence while at the same time affirming feelings of dependence and blocking the expression of strong emotion. The bland and empty disco-supermarket-mall-mellow facade of mass existence can be overwhelming. Yet within people there was also enormous anger for which bureaucratic society provided few outlets.

Lasch was expressing harsh and then-contrarian views, some that liberals, conservatives, and even radicals hesitated to embrace at the time. For example, he believed that American society was fast approaching a point of moral dissolution, but charged that both the “welfare state” and permissiveness were among the causes of the impending collapse. At the same time, he saw hope in the potential for resistance among working people who retained religious, family, and neighborhood roots.

One of his targets was the “awareness” movement. In that regard, when I asked what Lasch thought about Erhard Seminars Training (Est), an extension of the human potential movement, he offered that it did have some appeal as an “antidote” to narcissism. Yet his reason was chilling. “It entails a certain amount of arbitrary discipline, a kind of submission to authority that you find in some religious cults, too,” he said. “People who lack meaning and structure are likely to turn to some sort of authoritarian solution.”

In view of this, I wondered where he thought the necessary vision for change would come from. “There is more resistance among people who really don’t have much stake in the present economic system, people who are victimized by it,” he replied. “Their working environment is not invaded by bureaucracy in the same way. And the second thing is that they have some cultural resources, like religion, that help to counteract this. Of course, all these things are often sneered at as evidence of the backward mentality of American workers. We’re going to have to view that in a much more positive light.

“One of the problems I see is an erosion of any sense of moral responsibility. That’s closely linked to the loss of competence. And religion is one impulse that helps to keep alive the sense that people are responsible for what they do. It represents a sort of moral realism that is very important now.”

But the family, church, neighborhoods and institutions were all under assault, Lasch warned. And, although somewhat skeptical about what he viewed as a gradual shift toward state socialism, he acknowledged that “the state is going to have to play a larger role,” particularly in areas like energy and resource allocation.

On the other hand, he also foresaw a risk that turned out to be all too real: that an expansion of the state’s role, combined with exploitation of reactionary tendencies in the family and church, could spark the authoritarian surge he feared.