Maine professor explains how conspiracy theories pose a threat to democracy

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Maine professor explains how conspiracy theories pose a threat to democracy

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Updated: 11:38 PM EST Jan 7, 2021

In the aftermath of Wednesday’s siege of the U.S. Capitol building, many are blaming President Trump for giving credence to conspiracy theories like Q-Anon, or even his false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election.“We often talk about conspiracy theories like an ecosystem of stories that people are inhabiting a world of and so I wouldn’t say that necessarily the people who were engaged in the violence yesterday were all part of one conspiracy theory. I think we could see multiple threads of them running together,” said Jamie McKown, a professor of political science at the College of the Atlantic.From Q-Anon to the president’s repeated and false claims of voter fraud, McKown said some theories, though, date even farther back.“People who are engaged in kind of conspiratorial narratives and explanations, you know, often they feel marginalized because the mainstream media and others aren’t reporting on it, but when someone in a – you know a position of authority acknowledges it, or somehow even tacitly acknowledges it, that’s like gold. That’s like pouring gasoline on the fire,” McKown said.Acknowledgment that President Trump has given at campaign rallies and speeches throughout his presidency, telling the right-wing extremist group the Proud Boys to, “stand back and stand by,” during a presidential debate in 2020.The president gave a nod to conspiracy theorists even on Wednesday prior to the acts of violence, saying to the crowd gathered: “To use a favorite term that all of you people came up with, we will stop the steal.”Conspiracy theories were here long before the internet, but with the acknowledgment fringe extremist groups and conspiracy theorists have gotten from the president, McKown said it’ll be a difficult, if not impossible, challenge for President-elect Joe Biden to overcome.“If you’re assuming from the get-go that whatever I say I’m saying because I am part of the conspiracy, that makes it really hard to even start the conversation, right?” McKown said, adding that that same principle is also what makes the theories so dangerous for democracy.“One of the things that is implicit about conspiracy narratives is they almost do – they reject the good faith of the person that you’re engaging with,” McKown said.