OPINION/BROWN: Taking comfort in conspiracy theories – Opinion
It was Dec. 4, 2016, near the nation’s capital, and Edgar Welch was about to do something heroic. It was all over the internet that Comet Ping Pong pizzeria housed secret tunnels in which Hillary Clinton and others kept children penned up in cages. Edgar was there to rescue them.
Just the previous month, two women had been banging around, looking for evidence. “All of this is an underground tunnel that helps take the kids and transport them back and forth so they can do these rituals,” said one. “They are putting a lot of curses and spells over the city.”
Edgar stormed the place, fired his AR-15 a few times and found no children. Turns out, Comet Ping Pong had no basement. Welch had come all the way up from North Carolina.
“The intel on this wasn’t 100%,” Welch confessed later. But where had his “intel” come from? What was the message? COVID-19 was a Chinese plot. Bill Gates … or Anthony Fauci … invented it to make Trump look bad … to wreck our economy … to profit from it later by pedaling vaccines. Oh, and the Democrats are arranging for UN troops to occupy America and nullify Trump’s victory, which, barring Democratic skulduggery, is an accomplished fact. It’s all online.
Recently, a bipartisan senatorial panel confirmed the extent of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and beyond, probing our electoral machinery and pouring gasoline on fires we’ve set ourselves.
The QAnon conspiracies may be the most powerful. In short, highly placed members of the Democratic Party are supposedly engaged in a massive child sex-trafficking ring. Helpless children are imprisoned in a massive underground tunnel system. Worse, if possible, some of the children are drained of their blood for Satanic rituals … or even eaten! And you thought Democrats just wanted to pay your medical bills.
The blood ritual idea is medieval. Jews were tortured in horrible ways to confess to abominations like this, but for all the horror, evidence was never found. And yet, here it is again, on the internet.
QAnon’s reach has become global. And even in Germany, the hero is none other than Donald Trump. Even now, he’s secretly saving the children and undoing the deep state that supports and protects the child traffickers. Various polls reveal that a quarter of all Americans think the COVID conspiracy contains at least some truth. Reportedly, over half of Republicans believe QAnon is at least partially right. Trump is happy to pass on the rumors, and since “they seem to like me,” he says, he’s happy to like them back. God knows, the QAnon crowd isn’t voting for Biden.
Even if only some of the people believe only some of the conspiracies, the net effect is a lingering distrust of Democrats as a whole. And in a tight election, that can make all the difference. It also makes national healing almost impossible.
Maybe we’ve never seen a political landscape as bizarre as this. Why are conspiracy theories so compelling? First, once inside the circle, all conflicting evidence is refuted. Once the mainstream media are not only understood as biased but as dishonest, you can’t believe a thing they say. Conspiracy theories are self-insulated from contradictory data.
St. Paul described faith as “belief in things unseen.” QAnon is operating as a faith group, and there is a satisfaction in knowing things that the great mass of humanity does not yet know.
Like many religions, conspiracy theories offer hope that in the end the believers will triumph against all odds. The escalator scrolls down from heaven and the elect rise, seeing the damned crowded into the lake of fire. The end of times isn’t so bad if God punishes the people you want him to.
Conspiracy theories are deeply narcissistic enterprises. The more wicked your adversaries, the more heroic you become in opposing them. Their wickedness becomes a necessary belief. It‘s not enough to imagine your opponents are logically or factually wrong. True believers are being asked to imagine their political opponents are satanic pedophiles, cannibals — that they are willing to sicken millions and see hundreds of thousands of their neighbors die — just to achieve their dark purposes. True believers are heroic only if these terrible things are true. So they cling to their belief, as horrified as they are.
Here is their power. A conspiratorial understanding of history, of politics, can be far more emotionally gratifying than evidence-based, rational thinking. It is, in a ghastly way, more entertaining. It offers heroism and meaning in the midst of a pandemic and an economic catastrophe. With all their dark rumors, conspiracy theories are a narcissist’s paradise. And they can be used, against all evidence to the contrary, to win elections. That, dear reader, is what they’re really for.
Lawrence Brown, of Centerville, teaches humanities and is a columnist for the Cape Cod Times. Email him at columnresponse@gmail.com.
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