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A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy
How the new conspiracists are undermining democracy--and what can be done about it
Conspiracy theories are as old as politics. But conspiracists today have introduced something new--conspiracy without theory. And the new conspiracism has moved from the fringes to the heart of government with the election of Donald Trump. In A Lot of People Are Saying, Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum show how the new conspiracism differs from classic conspiracy theory, why so few officials speak truth to conspiracy, and what needs to be done to resist it.
Classic conspiracy theory insists that things are not what they seem and gathers evidence--especially facts ominously withheld by official sources--to tease out secret machinations. The new conspiracism is different. There is no demand for evidence, no dots revealed to form a pattern, no close examination of shadowy plotters. Dispensing with the burden of explanation, the new conspiracism imposes its own reality through repetition (exemplified by the Trump catchphrase "a lot of people are saying") and bare assertion ("rigged!").
The new conspiracism targets democratic foundations--political parties and knowledge-producing institutions. It makes it more difficult to argue, persuade, negotiate, compromise, and even to disagree. Ultimately, it delegitimates democracy.
Filled with vivid examples, A Lot of People Are Saying diagnoses a defining and disorienting feature of today's politics and offers a guide to responding to the threat.
Conspiracy theories are as old as politics. But conspiracists today have introduced something new--conspiracy without theory. And the new conspiracism has moved from the fringes to the heart of government with the election of Donald Trump. In A Lot of People Are Saying, Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum show how the new conspiracism differs from classic conspiracy theory, why so few officials speak truth to conspiracy, and what needs to be done to resist it.
Classic conspiracy theory insists that things are not what they seem and gathers evidence--especially facts ominously withheld by official sources--to tease out secret machinations. The new conspiracism is different. There is no demand for evidence, no dots revealed to form a pattern, no close examination of shadowy plotters. Dispensing with the burden of explanation, the new conspiracism imposes its own reality through repetition (exemplified by the Trump catchphrase "a lot of people are saying") and bare assertion ("rigged!").
The new conspiracism targets democratic foundations--political parties and knowledge-producing institutions. It makes it more difficult to argue, persuade, negotiate, compromise, and even to disagree. Ultimately, it delegitimates democracy.
Filled with vivid examples, A Lot of People Are Saying diagnoses a defining and disorienting feature of today's politics and offers a guide to responding to the threat.
232 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2019
151 people are currently reading
2480 people want to read
About the author
Russell Muirhead
11 books11 followersRussell Muirhead is the Robert Clements Professor of Democracy and Politics at Dartmouth College and the author of The Promise of Party in a Polarized Age and Just Work. He lives in Hanover, New Hampshire.
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September 25, 2020
I have decided to embark on a mission to read a number of books on subjects that will be of great importance to the upcoming 2020 US Presidential Election. Many of these will focus on actors intricately involved in the process, in hopes that I can understand them better and, perhaps, educate others with the power to cast a ballot. I am, as always, open to serious recommendations from anyone who has a book I might like to include in the process.
This is Book #9 in my 2020 US Election Preparation Challenge.
I have read a number of books already on my book challenge, with a great deal more to cover before November. Many have been insightful and some have been downright educational, but when I got my hands on this tome by Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, I knew I was in for something even more intense. Muirhead and Rosenblum seek not only to discuss that there are conspiracy theories floating around the American political system, but that there has been a significant shift in them over the last five to ten years, fuelled less by those who offer their own spin on certain facts and more in an attempt to derail legitimacy and creat chaos of the democratic system. So what? These conspiracies and the creation of the larger conspiracism has eroded the everyday way that Americans (and others) see the world and question truths that have long been self-evident. This is no longer simply questioning truth and using concrete facts to promote other ideas. By exploring the system of new conspiracism, the modes by which they are professed, and how to debunk them, Muirhead and Rosenblum do their best to wrest control of truth back, hoping the reader can help see through the haze and keep the masses on the same page.
Many still wonder what happened to John F. Kennedy in Dallas, citing their own views that they substantiate with photographs and testimony from witnesses. Others have seen objects flying around in the air and might have photos or documents that show a place in Nevada or New Mexico that seems to be in the same vicinity. These may be conspiracy theories, but those who present it use fact and argue from a substantiated (albeit shaky) perspective. In the new conspiracism, the authors argue that people have begun creating their theories, not on concrete proofs, but the elusive “many people say”. At the time of this book’s writing, the country was still trying to volume to terms with the Trump victory and such conspiracies as the child sex ring being run out of a D.C. pizzeria. This conspiracy that Clinton was involved in it was propagated by some and cited that “many people say” it’s true, yet none of these many seem ever to pull themselves before a microphone to substantiate it. Other aspects of this new conspiracism is the flirting with reality through something called “true enough”, where outlandish comments are made, the speaker agrees that they may not be true, but that “they sound within the realm of plausibility”, thereby making their assertion true enough to be actual. This veiled attempt to get lies injected into the everyday is both sly and completely asinine, yet people take it as gospel truth and push it around like a farmer fertilizing their fields. The authors cite many examples of how this is becoming the norm, with people accepting things simply because a vague collective seems to believe them and they wish not to be left on the sidelines in a movement towards ‘the new truth’. How this spreads is just as troubling, but also part and parcel of readily available technology.
The only way that a conspiracy runs is by fuelling it with acknowledgement. This is the crux of the argument made in this portion of the book, though the authors choose to roll out a great deal more to discuss this with the reader. At the head of this is commentary by people in positions of power. People, like Trump, stand up and make these comments, citing the forms above, and spread the word that they are hearing or seeing things that the general public needs to understand. This gets people talking and the word, albeit inherently lies, spreads. There is no need to substantiate or seek information to solidify it, just that they heard it. Like a poorly played game of Telephone, the message gets out and is (likely) bastardised even more. One person tells ten, they each tell twenty, and soon enough the world is talking about sex rings in pizza parlours and how the Clintons are trying to ship kids off to Uganda. Other, and more dangerous means, of transmission include social media, where a tweet or posting can go viral and people are blindly accepting without a shred of evidence. The authors express how this is where Trump gets a lot of his conspiracism fuel, sending out blatant lies and it gets people talking. He would never bend the truth, would he? He says that he has seen the documents, heard the people talking about it, so it must be true.
This is where QAnon started and how America jumped onto the bandwagon of looking under rocks. A post on a webpage has left many scrambling, as the anonymous person cites that they are an insider, so it must be true. This anonymous drop of information, again without substantiation, is the greatest way to promulgate the lies that conspiracism is seeking to promote. There is no end to it and, as the authors make clear, those in positions of power (read: the Republicans as it relates to Trump comments) do little but stand by and wait for the wind to change. Trump is no team player, but they keep nodding and running with it, in hopes that their electoral base will support them while continuing to wear their tinfoil hats.
Again, we ask, so what? It’s not harming anyone to let others rattle off some of their inane comments and hope nothing sticks. This is where the authors posit that it is doing damage by deligitimising the democratic process. While democracy permits a clash of ideas, by tearing someone down on the whole, it removes any chance that what they say could hold any value. Alternatively, institutions are painted with the same brush, thereby instilling distrust in something like the CDC when it comes to rates of transmission of COVID-19 or findings by the FBI on domestic insurrections. These are no longer small pebbles being tossed at the grand door, but battering rams that decimate and no one is seeing the bigger picture. No one is able to counter the attack, which only whittles down the already thin distrust in the political, governmental, and social fabric of America (and, by extension, the world). Something has to be done, but is there an answer, other than reading books like this?
The easiest reply to counter the delegitimisation is to fight back and stand up for truth. While it seems inherently sensible to do so, so does denying all the lies that have been swirling around, and yet too many people forget to do so. As the third section of the book explores, leaders need to stand up and debunk these empty truths, breathe air into the fact that this is all baseless conspiracy, and try to show that it is nothing more than someone trying to use a shiny bauble to distract from the reality of the situation. The authors push for this throughout, if only to educate those who are on their way to complete Kool-Aid ingestion. Perhaps it is those core disbelievers in all this new conspiracism who stand with their heads in the sand, but it seems to be the only way to pull democracy back from the brink and to end the horrors that are being perpetrated. There is no democratic way to silence the speech of the speaker, but to counter it with substantiated truth can go a long way. We owe it to ourselves to remain vigilant and to challenge authority, but also to live in a world of facts and not empty sentiments that “other people” have already unearthed or espouse half-realities by floating an ides out there and letting it linger in the air. Americans—no, anyone—is better than that and it only takes a moment, as the authors posit, to stand up for truth and let it all come out. Challenge the garbage that is being espoused, demand concrete proof, and require substantial deligitimising comments before simply tearing it all down. If not for you, for your country!
I have read many great psychological thrillers (one of my favourite genres) in my lifetime, but this book opened my eyes to a lot of scary stuff that even I cannot stomach. The depth and widespread nature of the new conspiracism is mind-boggling, though I see it on a regular basis. I have friends who personally are riding the Trump Train when it comes to COVID-19, sending me videos to show how China created the virus and the CDC is profiting by pushing for testing, while companies who make masks and other protective gear see their stocks rise. Funny enough, these same people stand by these videos and will not speak with any of their own evidence. They feel it is on me to show that the medical and scientific breakthroughs are not fabricated. This is the core issue with this entire movement, that there is no truth to mainstream thinking without personal proof. When did society become to sceptical as to disbelieve everything they read? A little academic mindedness and challenging authority is great, but only when research is behind it. Now, we are supposed to not only substantiate proven scientific knowledge, but be able to speak on it, or we are part of the Dark State seeking to tear down America. As soon as Trump calls for his passengers, they push and shove to get a seat and drink copious amounts of the Kool-Aid on a trip to Jonestown all over again. Sitting idly by is no longer an option, as this cancer continues to spread. It must be handled and people must realise what’s going on. Sure, there is free speech and I would never hope to abrogate it. But, just like not being allowed to cry ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre, one should not be able to erode the basic tenets of democracy because they are not to your liking. One should not be able to deligitimise the entire system and then walk away while it is in shambles. This is not a four year issue that will end with the loss at the polls in 2020 (do not get me started on the refusal to leave office, but do find me something academic to read about the legal options, as I want to review it before November), it is something that will pervade democracy for as long as people are able to communicate with one another. Democracy thrives on differing opinions and yet those opinions ought to be seeped in truths or proofs. Otherwise, we just trump all the Founding Fathers brought and thumb our noses at the democratic process the world over.
John Donne said it best when explaining that no man is an island. However, building a bridge from one’s own beliefs and selling it as the only truth is too extreme. This tome seeks to shine some much needed light on the issues with new conspiracism in America and likely even the larger world community. There have been too many actions—sanctioned and birthed at the top of the American political system—that seek to remove legitimacy of the system and the foundation of the country as a whole. While Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum cannot debunk them all, they can help the reader discover just how problematic things are getting, while also providing some solutions. This is not a tome to decry the loss of academic challenging to a man who gets his truths from inside his head when not sipping Coke with Fox and Friends, but a warning that America is in a full-fledged war with itself about keeping democracy. The book is laid out effectively, presenting strong arguments and providing numerous proofs to support the sentiments. The authors do not profess to be soothsayers, but simply academics who can see what’s going on and how it might be resolved. While there is an academic nature to the writing, it is easily digestible for those who have an interesting in learning. It is chilling to see how inherent the indoctrination has been and I can only hope that many will read this to counter the brain-numbing rhetoric that is taking place. The only way to take back the democratic ideals on which America was founded is to cut the head of the Hydra, bury it, and begin healing. This is more than Trump, but also his lackeys who will do anything to promote him and sail in his slipstream. Succinct and to the point, this book pulls no punches, though it may leave many readers wanting to thrust their fists into the throat of those who spew poisonous comments without any backing. Then again, what do I know?
Kudos, Mr. Muirhead and Madam Rosenblum, for finally explaining much of what I have been feeling for so long. It is scary to watch from the sidelines, though this stupidity seeps into Canada, particularly the province in which I live. I can only hope your message will make its way into the mainstream. It is badly needed.
Love/hate the review? An ever-growing collection of others appears at:
http://pecheyponderings.wordpress.com/
A Book for All Seasons, a different sort of Book Challenge: https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/...
This is Book #9 in my 2020 US Election Preparation Challenge.
I have read a number of books already on my book challenge, with a great deal more to cover before November. Many have been insightful and some have been downright educational, but when I got my hands on this tome by Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, I knew I was in for something even more intense. Muirhead and Rosenblum seek not only to discuss that there are conspiracy theories floating around the American political system, but that there has been a significant shift in them over the last five to ten years, fuelled less by those who offer their own spin on certain facts and more in an attempt to derail legitimacy and creat chaos of the democratic system. So what? These conspiracies and the creation of the larger conspiracism has eroded the everyday way that Americans (and others) see the world and question truths that have long been self-evident. This is no longer simply questioning truth and using concrete facts to promote other ideas. By exploring the system of new conspiracism, the modes by which they are professed, and how to debunk them, Muirhead and Rosenblum do their best to wrest control of truth back, hoping the reader can help see through the haze and keep the masses on the same page.
Many still wonder what happened to John F. Kennedy in Dallas, citing their own views that they substantiate with photographs and testimony from witnesses. Others have seen objects flying around in the air and might have photos or documents that show a place in Nevada or New Mexico that seems to be in the same vicinity. These may be conspiracy theories, but those who present it use fact and argue from a substantiated (albeit shaky) perspective. In the new conspiracism, the authors argue that people have begun creating their theories, not on concrete proofs, but the elusive “many people say”. At the time of this book’s writing, the country was still trying to volume to terms with the Trump victory and such conspiracies as the child sex ring being run out of a D.C. pizzeria. This conspiracy that Clinton was involved in it was propagated by some and cited that “many people say” it’s true, yet none of these many seem ever to pull themselves before a microphone to substantiate it. Other aspects of this new conspiracism is the flirting with reality through something called “true enough”, where outlandish comments are made, the speaker agrees that they may not be true, but that “they sound within the realm of plausibility”, thereby making their assertion true enough to be actual. This veiled attempt to get lies injected into the everyday is both sly and completely asinine, yet people take it as gospel truth and push it around like a farmer fertilizing their fields. The authors cite many examples of how this is becoming the norm, with people accepting things simply because a vague collective seems to believe them and they wish not to be left on the sidelines in a movement towards ‘the new truth’. How this spreads is just as troubling, but also part and parcel of readily available technology.
The only way that a conspiracy runs is by fuelling it with acknowledgement. This is the crux of the argument made in this portion of the book, though the authors choose to roll out a great deal more to discuss this with the reader. At the head of this is commentary by people in positions of power. People, like Trump, stand up and make these comments, citing the forms above, and spread the word that they are hearing or seeing things that the general public needs to understand. This gets people talking and the word, albeit inherently lies, spreads. There is no need to substantiate or seek information to solidify it, just that they heard it. Like a poorly played game of Telephone, the message gets out and is (likely) bastardised even more. One person tells ten, they each tell twenty, and soon enough the world is talking about sex rings in pizza parlours and how the Clintons are trying to ship kids off to Uganda. Other, and more dangerous means, of transmission include social media, where a tweet or posting can go viral and people are blindly accepting without a shred of evidence. The authors express how this is where Trump gets a lot of his conspiracism fuel, sending out blatant lies and it gets people talking. He would never bend the truth, would he? He says that he has seen the documents, heard the people talking about it, so it must be true.
This is where QAnon started and how America jumped onto the bandwagon of looking under rocks. A post on a webpage has left many scrambling, as the anonymous person cites that they are an insider, so it must be true. This anonymous drop of information, again without substantiation, is the greatest way to promulgate the lies that conspiracism is seeking to promote. There is no end to it and, as the authors make clear, those in positions of power (read: the Republicans as it relates to Trump comments) do little but stand by and wait for the wind to change. Trump is no team player, but they keep nodding and running with it, in hopes that their electoral base will support them while continuing to wear their tinfoil hats.
Again, we ask, so what? It’s not harming anyone to let others rattle off some of their inane comments and hope nothing sticks. This is where the authors posit that it is doing damage by deligitimising the democratic process. While democracy permits a clash of ideas, by tearing someone down on the whole, it removes any chance that what they say could hold any value. Alternatively, institutions are painted with the same brush, thereby instilling distrust in something like the CDC when it comes to rates of transmission of COVID-19 or findings by the FBI on domestic insurrections. These are no longer small pebbles being tossed at the grand door, but battering rams that decimate and no one is seeing the bigger picture. No one is able to counter the attack, which only whittles down the already thin distrust in the political, governmental, and social fabric of America (and, by extension, the world). Something has to be done, but is there an answer, other than reading books like this?
The easiest reply to counter the delegitimisation is to fight back and stand up for truth. While it seems inherently sensible to do so, so does denying all the lies that have been swirling around, and yet too many people forget to do so. As the third section of the book explores, leaders need to stand up and debunk these empty truths, breathe air into the fact that this is all baseless conspiracy, and try to show that it is nothing more than someone trying to use a shiny bauble to distract from the reality of the situation. The authors push for this throughout, if only to educate those who are on their way to complete Kool-Aid ingestion. Perhaps it is those core disbelievers in all this new conspiracism who stand with their heads in the sand, but it seems to be the only way to pull democracy back from the brink and to end the horrors that are being perpetrated. There is no democratic way to silence the speech of the speaker, but to counter it with substantiated truth can go a long way. We owe it to ourselves to remain vigilant and to challenge authority, but also to live in a world of facts and not empty sentiments that “other people” have already unearthed or espouse half-realities by floating an ides out there and letting it linger in the air. Americans—no, anyone—is better than that and it only takes a moment, as the authors posit, to stand up for truth and let it all come out. Challenge the garbage that is being espoused, demand concrete proof, and require substantial deligitimising comments before simply tearing it all down. If not for you, for your country!
I have read many great psychological thrillers (one of my favourite genres) in my lifetime, but this book opened my eyes to a lot of scary stuff that even I cannot stomach. The depth and widespread nature of the new conspiracism is mind-boggling, though I see it on a regular basis. I have friends who personally are riding the Trump Train when it comes to COVID-19, sending me videos to show how China created the virus and the CDC is profiting by pushing for testing, while companies who make masks and other protective gear see their stocks rise. Funny enough, these same people stand by these videos and will not speak with any of their own evidence. They feel it is on me to show that the medical and scientific breakthroughs are not fabricated. This is the core issue with this entire movement, that there is no truth to mainstream thinking without personal proof. When did society become to sceptical as to disbelieve everything they read? A little academic mindedness and challenging authority is great, but only when research is behind it. Now, we are supposed to not only substantiate proven scientific knowledge, but be able to speak on it, or we are part of the Dark State seeking to tear down America. As soon as Trump calls for his passengers, they push and shove to get a seat and drink copious amounts of the Kool-Aid on a trip to Jonestown all over again. Sitting idly by is no longer an option, as this cancer continues to spread. It must be handled and people must realise what’s going on. Sure, there is free speech and I would never hope to abrogate it. But, just like not being allowed to cry ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre, one should not be able to erode the basic tenets of democracy because they are not to your liking. One should not be able to deligitimise the entire system and then walk away while it is in shambles. This is not a four year issue that will end with the loss at the polls in 2020 (do not get me started on the refusal to leave office, but do find me something academic to read about the legal options, as I want to review it before November), it is something that will pervade democracy for as long as people are able to communicate with one another. Democracy thrives on differing opinions and yet those opinions ought to be seeped in truths or proofs. Otherwise, we just trump all the Founding Fathers brought and thumb our noses at the democratic process the world over.
John Donne said it best when explaining that no man is an island. However, building a bridge from one’s own beliefs and selling it as the only truth is too extreme. This tome seeks to shine some much needed light on the issues with new conspiracism in America and likely even the larger world community. There have been too many actions—sanctioned and birthed at the top of the American political system—that seek to remove legitimacy of the system and the foundation of the country as a whole. While Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum cannot debunk them all, they can help the reader discover just how problematic things are getting, while also providing some solutions. This is not a tome to decry the loss of academic challenging to a man who gets his truths from inside his head when not sipping Coke with Fox and Friends, but a warning that America is in a full-fledged war with itself about keeping democracy. The book is laid out effectively, presenting strong arguments and providing numerous proofs to support the sentiments. The authors do not profess to be soothsayers, but simply academics who can see what’s going on and how it might be resolved. While there is an academic nature to the writing, it is easily digestible for those who have an interesting in learning. It is chilling to see how inherent the indoctrination has been and I can only hope that many will read this to counter the brain-numbing rhetoric that is taking place. The only way to take back the democratic ideals on which America was founded is to cut the head of the Hydra, bury it, and begin healing. This is more than Trump, but also his lackeys who will do anything to promote him and sail in his slipstream. Succinct and to the point, this book pulls no punches, though it may leave many readers wanting to thrust their fists into the throat of those who spew poisonous comments without any backing. Then again, what do I know?
Kudos, Mr. Muirhead and Madam Rosenblum, for finally explaining much of what I have been feeling for so long. It is scary to watch from the sidelines, though this stupidity seeps into Canada, particularly the province in which I live. I can only hope your message will make its way into the mainstream. It is badly needed.
Love/hate the review? An ever-growing collection of others appears at:
http://pecheyponderings.wordpress.com/
A Book for All Seasons, a different sort of Book Challenge: https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/...
December 5, 2020
This is a fascinating academic account of the new conspiracy theories and how they are initiated and spread--and also how they differ from the older forms. This is going to be a problem that we as a society need to wrap our heads around--especially because so many of our collective problems require us to have shared understanding of scientific facts (i.e. vaccines, climate change, etc) and the new conspiracists and their "I'm just asking questions" is the perfect weapon for some people to not believe facts that they prefer not to believe .
October 30, 2019
I was predisposed to agree with Muirhead and Rosenblum's main thesis (roughly that "the relatively unmoderated chaos of the internet has allowed Republicans to spew more bullshit faster than ever before, accentuating a general crisis of confidence in institutions") before even reading the book, but reading their argument at length gave me a bit more to chew on. I'm not sure that the "new conspiracism" of the subtitle ("a conspiracy theory without the theory") is really so different than the old-school conspiracy theories they use as a comparison, since both "conspiracy" and "theory" are not so easily defined, and it's often hard to see a real distinction between stupid things people believe now and the stupid things they've always believed. However, I do think there is a good case that something has changed about how controversies are treated in the media, which allows for stupid beliefs to persist and even flourish in a way that they haven't been able to before, and therefore the sheer volume of persistent conspiracy theories that's accumulated has poisoned the well of public discourse. Muirhead and Rosenblum have impeccably logical explanations for how Donald Trump et al's style of habitually repeating malicious lies destabilizes institutions in a negative feedback cycle, and even though "cranky right-wing idiot" is a familiar archetype across both American history and the world stage, the fact that someone of his caliber was able to be elected President says more about our rotten institutions than it does about him. They're predictably less useful on the solutions front, but they're hardly alone in that.
Their thesis is that there is a difference between "classic" conspiracy theories and the "new conspiracism". Classic conspiracy theories identify an event or state of the world, posit an explanation for that event or state, and tie that explanation to a political theory. For example, JFK wasn't randomly killed by Oswald the lone nut, he was deliberately assassinated by the Mafia over RFK's prosecution of organized crime, or by the CIA over the Bay of Pigs fiasco, or by LBJ over his ambition to be President, and the resulting change of administration either directly or indirectly benefited the parties involved (they also have the fantastic example of the Declaration of Independence as a conspiracy theorist document, which is both hilarious and also a little goofy). In contrast, the new conspiracism is just an endless series of unfalsifiable negative assertions, where it's basically irrelevant if any specific claim happens to be true. Pizzagate is a representative example, where prominent Democrats like Hillary Clinton and John Podesta are supposedly running a child sex slavery ring out of the basement of a Washington DC pizza joint as fronts for a global network of Satanic elites, and the most maximally tortured possible reading of Podesta's hacked emails are used to find coded messages that confirm a worldwide human trafficking network and all these other nefarious deeds. If any particular detail doesn't seem to hold up to scrutiny, there's always another "but what about THIS?!" accusation that, unless exhaustively disproven, serves as yet more proof that Hillary Clinton and company are Sandusky crossed with Dahmer raised to the power of the Rothschilds.
So their main distinction between the new conspiracism and the old is that conspiracy theories are now unkillable, and in fact oddly nihilistic, since their proponents don't actually expect anyone to do much about these supposed crimes (e.g. QAnon adherents have to invent ever more elaborate explanations for why all these people are not in jail if they're so obviously guilty, whereas independence was the "solution" for the American revolutionaries). Instead of being able to say "actually, John Podesta's risotto recipe is just a risotto recipe, therefore it's not evidence of a sex dungeon in a pizza restaurant, therefore Hillary Clinton is probably not running a pedophile ring" in the same way as you used to be able to say "actually, the single bullet explanation is consistent with how JFK and Connally were seated relative to each other, therefore it's not evidence of multiple gunmen, therefore there probably weren't any shooters other than Oswald", the hapless normal person attempting to respond to this stuff will always be confronted by new accusations of vile perfidy with proof perpetually just over the horizon, an endlessly wearying vista of fever dreams to beat back. The rise of the internet has propelled this new conspiracism from the fringes to the center of our discourse, allowing unscrupulous figures like Donald Trump to rise to power on a tidal wave of bullshit, since we're all drowning in information and our pudding-like brains will just accept whatever confirms our prior beliefs, and even if in theory the left and the right should be equally susceptible to nonsense, right-wing new conspiracism is aimed directly at institutions themselves, which furthers even more the sense of a world adrift without any adults in charge.
Stated in that way their distinction sounds reasonable, but I'm skeptical if there's a true difference, or if the internet has just presented us with far more information to have to analyze while simultaneously destroying our attention spans and critical thinking skills. It's hard to say that new conspiracy theories like Birtherism or the products of the Arkansas Project are different and more unkillable than JFK conspiracy theories when the JFK conspiracy theory industry is still alive and kicking after over 50 years (the conspiracy merch vendors outside the Sixth Floor Museum all stand by their products). To their detriment, Muirhead and Rosenblum never try to actually define what the "unit" of a conspiracy theory is, so we can't really say if conspiracy theories have gotten more elaborate or implausible or unfalsifiable over time. Matt Taibbi once had a great article called "The Hopeless Stupidity of 9/11 Conspiracies" mocking the bizarre mental contortions required to even begin to make sense of the supposed 9/11 plot (which M & R oddly classify as an old-school conspiracy theory), but it's obviously never been the case that most people actually write down every step of the whole chain of logic in their pet theory from the very beginning, they'll just take it for granted that someone else has already done the legwork and build on that foundation. These days adherents share increasingly inscrutable conspiracy memes with each other on Facebook, but I'm sure the John Birch Society's tracts and pamphlets were not much different. I grew up watching The X-Files, an incredibly prescient show which they somehow don't cite even once, and watching it gave me appreciation for how fun it is to spin lurid tales of shadowy conspiracies, as well as how little sense most conspiracies make once you start looking at them critically, but even then, an overarching conspiracy that's incoherent as a whole can look very plausible on the day by day or episode by episode level.
All of this is in novels like Foucault's Pendulum, but another example of that's near and dear to my heart is Alex Jones. Back when I was in high school, he had yet to make his unfortunate transformation from Austin's "lovable local nutcase" into a nationally infamous deranged hoax promoter, and I would sometimes listen to his radio show for kicks on my drive home from school. Alex Jones would think nothing of having a rant about how global warming was obviously fake and a UN plot to steal our freedoms and make America a fascist socialist police state segue smoothly into a rant about how global warming was actually all too real and would be exploited by crony capitalist elites like Bill Gates and the Bilderbergs to get third world countries hooked on GMO foods and surveillance technology. To a rational outsider, the coexistence of plainly incompatible conspiracy theories like that should give you pause - perhaps either hypothesis might be true, but both can't be true at the same time, and if someone persists in this simultaneous contradiction for too long, the safe bet is to discount their whole belief system entirely. And yet for many people, the opposite happens, and each individual pseudo-fact becomes just another data point that they can plug into their own private X-Files, drawing their personalized conspiracist constellations atop the infinite sky of suspicious stars.
After all, all conspiracy theories exist on a continuum of plausibility, and, unfortunately sometimes conspiracies are actually real. Pizzagate isn't real, but what about Jeffrey Epstein? Oswald may have been a lone gunman, but isn't it true that he had an enormous number of truly odd and questionable connections to important figures of the day, and hasn't the US supported exactly these kinds of shadow coups abroad? The whole world is a Pynchon novel that we're all trapped in, and when you start linking individual theories together there's no end to the mischief you can cause. A semi-normal person who started out believing in "plausible" conspiracy theories like the Clinton Foundation stuff and was predisposed to right-wing tribalism could easily be gradually led into the swamps of Pizzagate and QAnon, never to return, no matter how vigorously the original entry point was debunked, because once they cross the Rubicon everything they read just feeds into the unshakeable conviction that "Hillary Clinton is part of an evil cabal". A diagram of the supposed "Clinton body count" victims might look crazy to an outsider in the same way that the central conspiracy of The X-Files doesn't make much sense if you try to write the whole mythology out on paper, and yet at the same time the idea that Hillary Clinton has had dozens of people directly murdered is an effectively impossibly daunting mountain to scale for the brave soul who's trying to deprogram their Fox News-poisoned relative, especially when they won't trust any outside sources of information.
The problem of "epistemic closure" is another depressing facet of this phenomenon, perhaps the main one. Julian Sanchez first applied the philosophical term to politics in a 2010 blog post titled "Epistemic Closure, Technology, and the End of Distance" which has held up extremely well, even down to his specific example of how conservatives tuned out reality when the rest of the country objected to their being pointlessly cruel to a teenager (liberals are of course not immune to this tendency either, but it's obviously nowhere near to the same degree). There's a few books out there - Anna Merlan's Republic of Lies, Martin Gurri's Revolt of the Public - which delve more deeply into the logic of the collapse in public trust in media figures, but it's hard to see a good way out of this based solely on mass media literacy. Centralized big media companies have well-known flaws, but the solution to ossified corrupt hierarchies probably shouldn't be random people with blogs, except that it probably also shouldn't be unaccountable algorithms deciding what's trustworthy and what's not. The ceaseless, self-reinforcing rage storm that gets called "populism" is incompatible with a pluralist society, yet populist leaders (invariably grifters who feed on the stupidity of their supporters, as in Trump) just start to delegitimize any sources of disproof, since as the saying goes "you can't reason someone out of something they didn't reason themselves into".
Muirhead and Rosenblum effectively have no solution to our political structure circling the drain, beyond general calls to stand up for democracy and institutions, but I didn't really expect them to solve the result of decades of of determined efforts to build a right-wing alternate reality machine in a <200 page book. Last year Michael Bang Petersen, Mathias Osmundsen, and Kevin Arceneaux won an award for their paper "A 'Need for Chaos' and the Sharing of Hostile Political Rumors in Advanced Democracies", which bears directly on this problem. Their conclusion was that a big motivator for people who just really love stupid conspiracy theories was economic stagnation, which gets translated into a general "some men just want to watch the world burn" mentality. So theoretically a better economy coupled with electoral reform coupled with enforcement penalties for bad actors à la House Democrats' proposals in HR1 will somewhat reduce this poisonous conspiracism, except that ironically conspiracists also love voting for right-wing con artists who won't do anything at all to aid the economy and will in fact just entrench themselves further to use the levers of power to steal from the public commons. I think the best solution is to support liberal/progressive/left-wing political candidates who will break the stranglehold of the elites, but that's a lot easier said, even if a lot of people are saying it too, than done.
Their thesis is that there is a difference between "classic" conspiracy theories and the "new conspiracism". Classic conspiracy theories identify an event or state of the world, posit an explanation for that event or state, and tie that explanation to a political theory. For example, JFK wasn't randomly killed by Oswald the lone nut, he was deliberately assassinated by the Mafia over RFK's prosecution of organized crime, or by the CIA over the Bay of Pigs fiasco, or by LBJ over his ambition to be President, and the resulting change of administration either directly or indirectly benefited the parties involved (they also have the fantastic example of the Declaration of Independence as a conspiracy theorist document, which is both hilarious and also a little goofy). In contrast, the new conspiracism is just an endless series of unfalsifiable negative assertions, where it's basically irrelevant if any specific claim happens to be true. Pizzagate is a representative example, where prominent Democrats like Hillary Clinton and John Podesta are supposedly running a child sex slavery ring out of the basement of a Washington DC pizza joint as fronts for a global network of Satanic elites, and the most maximally tortured possible reading of Podesta's hacked emails are used to find coded messages that confirm a worldwide human trafficking network and all these other nefarious deeds. If any particular detail doesn't seem to hold up to scrutiny, there's always another "but what about THIS?!" accusation that, unless exhaustively disproven, serves as yet more proof that Hillary Clinton and company are Sandusky crossed with Dahmer raised to the power of the Rothschilds.
So their main distinction between the new conspiracism and the old is that conspiracy theories are now unkillable, and in fact oddly nihilistic, since their proponents don't actually expect anyone to do much about these supposed crimes (e.g. QAnon adherents have to invent ever more elaborate explanations for why all these people are not in jail if they're so obviously guilty, whereas independence was the "solution" for the American revolutionaries). Instead of being able to say "actually, John Podesta's risotto recipe is just a risotto recipe, therefore it's not evidence of a sex dungeon in a pizza restaurant, therefore Hillary Clinton is probably not running a pedophile ring" in the same way as you used to be able to say "actually, the single bullet explanation is consistent with how JFK and Connally were seated relative to each other, therefore it's not evidence of multiple gunmen, therefore there probably weren't any shooters other than Oswald", the hapless normal person attempting to respond to this stuff will always be confronted by new accusations of vile perfidy with proof perpetually just over the horizon, an endlessly wearying vista of fever dreams to beat back. The rise of the internet has propelled this new conspiracism from the fringes to the center of our discourse, allowing unscrupulous figures like Donald Trump to rise to power on a tidal wave of bullshit, since we're all drowning in information and our pudding-like brains will just accept whatever confirms our prior beliefs, and even if in theory the left and the right should be equally susceptible to nonsense, right-wing new conspiracism is aimed directly at institutions themselves, which furthers even more the sense of a world adrift without any adults in charge.
Stated in that way their distinction sounds reasonable, but I'm skeptical if there's a true difference, or if the internet has just presented us with far more information to have to analyze while simultaneously destroying our attention spans and critical thinking skills. It's hard to say that new conspiracy theories like Birtherism or the products of the Arkansas Project are different and more unkillable than JFK conspiracy theories when the JFK conspiracy theory industry is still alive and kicking after over 50 years (the conspiracy merch vendors outside the Sixth Floor Museum all stand by their products). To their detriment, Muirhead and Rosenblum never try to actually define what the "unit" of a conspiracy theory is, so we can't really say if conspiracy theories have gotten more elaborate or implausible or unfalsifiable over time. Matt Taibbi once had a great article called "The Hopeless Stupidity of 9/11 Conspiracies" mocking the bizarre mental contortions required to even begin to make sense of the supposed 9/11 plot (which M & R oddly classify as an old-school conspiracy theory), but it's obviously never been the case that most people actually write down every step of the whole chain of logic in their pet theory from the very beginning, they'll just take it for granted that someone else has already done the legwork and build on that foundation. These days adherents share increasingly inscrutable conspiracy memes with each other on Facebook, but I'm sure the John Birch Society's tracts and pamphlets were not much different. I grew up watching The X-Files, an incredibly prescient show which they somehow don't cite even once, and watching it gave me appreciation for how fun it is to spin lurid tales of shadowy conspiracies, as well as how little sense most conspiracies make once you start looking at them critically, but even then, an overarching conspiracy that's incoherent as a whole can look very plausible on the day by day or episode by episode level.
All of this is in novels like Foucault's Pendulum, but another example of that's near and dear to my heart is Alex Jones. Back when I was in high school, he had yet to make his unfortunate transformation from Austin's "lovable local nutcase" into a nationally infamous deranged hoax promoter, and I would sometimes listen to his radio show for kicks on my drive home from school. Alex Jones would think nothing of having a rant about how global warming was obviously fake and a UN plot to steal our freedoms and make America a fascist socialist police state segue smoothly into a rant about how global warming was actually all too real and would be exploited by crony capitalist elites like Bill Gates and the Bilderbergs to get third world countries hooked on GMO foods and surveillance technology. To a rational outsider, the coexistence of plainly incompatible conspiracy theories like that should give you pause - perhaps either hypothesis might be true, but both can't be true at the same time, and if someone persists in this simultaneous contradiction for too long, the safe bet is to discount their whole belief system entirely. And yet for many people, the opposite happens, and each individual pseudo-fact becomes just another data point that they can plug into their own private X-Files, drawing their personalized conspiracist constellations atop the infinite sky of suspicious stars.
After all, all conspiracy theories exist on a continuum of plausibility, and, unfortunately sometimes conspiracies are actually real. Pizzagate isn't real, but what about Jeffrey Epstein? Oswald may have been a lone gunman, but isn't it true that he had an enormous number of truly odd and questionable connections to important figures of the day, and hasn't the US supported exactly these kinds of shadow coups abroad? The whole world is a Pynchon novel that we're all trapped in, and when you start linking individual theories together there's no end to the mischief you can cause. A semi-normal person who started out believing in "plausible" conspiracy theories like the Clinton Foundation stuff and was predisposed to right-wing tribalism could easily be gradually led into the swamps of Pizzagate and QAnon, never to return, no matter how vigorously the original entry point was debunked, because once they cross the Rubicon everything they read just feeds into the unshakeable conviction that "Hillary Clinton is part of an evil cabal". A diagram of the supposed "Clinton body count" victims might look crazy to an outsider in the same way that the central conspiracy of The X-Files doesn't make much sense if you try to write the whole mythology out on paper, and yet at the same time the idea that Hillary Clinton has had dozens of people directly murdered is an effectively impossibly daunting mountain to scale for the brave soul who's trying to deprogram their Fox News-poisoned relative, especially when they won't trust any outside sources of information.
The problem of "epistemic closure" is another depressing facet of this phenomenon, perhaps the main one. Julian Sanchez first applied the philosophical term to politics in a 2010 blog post titled "Epistemic Closure, Technology, and the End of Distance" which has held up extremely well, even down to his specific example of how conservatives tuned out reality when the rest of the country objected to their being pointlessly cruel to a teenager (liberals are of course not immune to this tendency either, but it's obviously nowhere near to the same degree). There's a few books out there - Anna Merlan's Republic of Lies, Martin Gurri's Revolt of the Public - which delve more deeply into the logic of the collapse in public trust in media figures, but it's hard to see a good way out of this based solely on mass media literacy. Centralized big media companies have well-known flaws, but the solution to ossified corrupt hierarchies probably shouldn't be random people with blogs, except that it probably also shouldn't be unaccountable algorithms deciding what's trustworthy and what's not. The ceaseless, self-reinforcing rage storm that gets called "populism" is incompatible with a pluralist society, yet populist leaders (invariably grifters who feed on the stupidity of their supporters, as in Trump) just start to delegitimize any sources of disproof, since as the saying goes "you can't reason someone out of something they didn't reason themselves into".
Muirhead and Rosenblum effectively have no solution to our political structure circling the drain, beyond general calls to stand up for democracy and institutions, but I didn't really expect them to solve the result of decades of of determined efforts to build a right-wing alternate reality machine in a <200 page book. Last year Michael Bang Petersen, Mathias Osmundsen, and Kevin Arceneaux won an award for their paper "A 'Need for Chaos' and the Sharing of Hostile Political Rumors in Advanced Democracies", which bears directly on this problem. Their conclusion was that a big motivator for people who just really love stupid conspiracy theories was economic stagnation, which gets translated into a general "some men just want to watch the world burn" mentality. So theoretically a better economy coupled with electoral reform coupled with enforcement penalties for bad actors à la House Democrats' proposals in HR1 will somewhat reduce this poisonous conspiracism, except that ironically conspiracists also love voting for right-wing con artists who won't do anything at all to aid the economy and will in fact just entrench themselves further to use the levers of power to steal from the public commons. I think the best solution is to support liberal/progressive/left-wing political candidates who will break the stranglehold of the elites, but that's a lot easier said, even if a lot of people are saying it too, than done.
September 20, 2020
Well that was depressing
April 8, 2021
I agree with the book’s main thesis - that today’s conspiracism, or new conspiracism, is “conspiracy without the theory”. How they defined the world we (specifically Americans) lived in for 4 years was about as accurate and objective as a book that’s been heavily researched as one could. As a reference point to the rise of conspiracies in the mainstream, you’ll do good to start here.
As for its delivery and conclusions, I’m left disappointed. For one thing, it’s an incredibly dry read, which I guess is to be expected for a piece like this. The other is that it’s a little optimistic in its assessment of where we’re headed; a lot of “so fars” and “not yets”. This book was clearly published before the events of 1/6/21, massive civil unrest, and as of me writing this review we are just shy of 500,000 dead of COVID. We have arrived at the point the authors assumed wouldn’t happen, and probably didn’t dream of happening. This is absolutely the work of the conspiracy minded president, the one they so deftly described as being the “owner of reality” and his enablers.
It’s also a mistake to just include American conspiracism as if Brazil doesn’t have an equally conspiracy minded leader who (successfully) jails political opponents on the notion that “A Lot of People Are Saying”. And while our coup attempt failed, there was a successful one that just occurred in Myanmar, under the guise of “voter irregularities”. Their military seized power after their candidate’s defeat; a version of that so nearly happened here. I suppose a book of only this length and scope couldn’t include other examples though they were in plain sight this whole time (Myanmar happened just this week, but it’s not like Putin hasn’t given plenty of examples himself).
One last thing I’ll note is the neglect to tie these conspiracies back to white supremacy or at least mention how that movement seizes on these as opportunities for recruitment is particularly egregious. I can’t think of Alex Jones, QAnon, Pizzagate, birtherism, or any other examples without tying them back somehow to continued and systemic white supremacy and anti-Semitism writ large. It’s briefly mentioned, but isn’t integral to the book. I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt, as I’m not the one who wrote and researched this text, and say that the authors are being as objective as possible. Perhaps the inclusion of that point would lead to a conspiracy of its own, who knows.
All in all I...recommend? But do more than just vote out people like Trump - actively fight against disinformation.
As for its delivery and conclusions, I’m left disappointed. For one thing, it’s an incredibly dry read, which I guess is to be expected for a piece like this. The other is that it’s a little optimistic in its assessment of where we’re headed; a lot of “so fars” and “not yets”. This book was clearly published before the events of 1/6/21, massive civil unrest, and as of me writing this review we are just shy of 500,000 dead of COVID. We have arrived at the point the authors assumed wouldn’t happen, and probably didn’t dream of happening. This is absolutely the work of the conspiracy minded president, the one they so deftly described as being the “owner of reality” and his enablers.
It’s also a mistake to just include American conspiracism as if Brazil doesn’t have an equally conspiracy minded leader who (successfully) jails political opponents on the notion that “A Lot of People Are Saying”. And while our coup attempt failed, there was a successful one that just occurred in Myanmar, under the guise of “voter irregularities”. Their military seized power after their candidate’s defeat; a version of that so nearly happened here. I suppose a book of only this length and scope couldn’t include other examples though they were in plain sight this whole time (Myanmar happened just this week, but it’s not like Putin hasn’t given plenty of examples himself).
One last thing I’ll note is the neglect to tie these conspiracies back to white supremacy or at least mention how that movement seizes on these as opportunities for recruitment is particularly egregious. I can’t think of Alex Jones, QAnon, Pizzagate, birtherism, or any other examples without tying them back somehow to continued and systemic white supremacy and anti-Semitism writ large. It’s briefly mentioned, but isn’t integral to the book. I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt, as I’m not the one who wrote and researched this text, and say that the authors are being as objective as possible. Perhaps the inclusion of that point would lead to a conspiracy of its own, who knows.
All in all I...recommend? But do more than just vote out people like Trump - actively fight against disinformation.
October 1, 2020
This is an examination of how conspiracism has taken over the national political dialogue and has come to dominate discourse. People no longer disagree on philosophies and values, the traditional debate which the author states is essential and important to democracy---they disagree on entire realities, which is far more troubling for our ability to discuss issues and reach compromises between disagreeing factions.
With the election of Trump, the conspiracism that was once bubbling under the surface of everyday society has completely gone off the rails, Muirhead observes. Trump is a great lover of conspiracies and alternate realities, and his statements both amplify and encourage this strange and aggressive discourse.
Conspiracy theories have been with us since the beginnings of human civilization—and for understandable reasons. People in power do indeed lie and mislead, institutions and businesses frequently spin reality to make themselves look better….and people wind up getting hurt as a result. It makes sense to question the motivations of different voices and study all sides of an issue before coming to our own conclusions. Healthy questioning is not what this book is about. Rather, it’s about the bizarre, Alex Jones-style dialogue that often dispenses with “theories” altogether. Don’t like what’s in the news? Pronounce it “fake;” the people involved all actors and the news outlets intentionally propagating falsehoods. The new conspiracism mimics mental health disorders, especially paranoid schizophrenia, in many ways.
Not addressed in this book, but perhaps reaching the tipping point of public notice, is how the new conspiracism has taken over the dialogue surrounding serious and fatal dog attacks. It is no longer okay to acknowledge that certain types of dogs, especially those bred for either dogfighting or guarding, have a lower threshold of launching an attack and can cause more serious damage to people or other dogs if they do. A vocal contingent has decided that, for some inexplicable reason, all media outlets hate certain dog breeds and are "lying" when they report on attacks by these animals. They oppose any acknowledgement that these dogs are higher-risk and require specialized care, or even laws designed to protect the dogs themselves from irresponsible ownership and breeding. The result? Skyrocketing dog attacks on Americans and their pets, and animal shelters that are absolutely filled with pit bulls and mastiff-mixes.
Also not addressed in this book, for the reason being that it is too new, are the myriad conspiracies flying around about COVID-19. Anyone who had hoped that the new conspiracism would be a passing fad was quickly disabused of this notion by the President and his supporters' response to the pandemic, a response that is having deadly consequences that we can see in real time.
I agree with the other reviewers who said that this reads like a book-length college thesis and is quite dry, so it might not quite have the reach of more engagingly-presented works.
With the election of Trump, the conspiracism that was once bubbling under the surface of everyday society has completely gone off the rails, Muirhead observes. Trump is a great lover of conspiracies and alternate realities, and his statements both amplify and encourage this strange and aggressive discourse.
Conspiracy theories have been with us since the beginnings of human civilization—and for understandable reasons. People in power do indeed lie and mislead, institutions and businesses frequently spin reality to make themselves look better….and people wind up getting hurt as a result. It makes sense to question the motivations of different voices and study all sides of an issue before coming to our own conclusions. Healthy questioning is not what this book is about. Rather, it’s about the bizarre, Alex Jones-style dialogue that often dispenses with “theories” altogether. Don’t like what’s in the news? Pronounce it “fake;” the people involved all actors and the news outlets intentionally propagating falsehoods. The new conspiracism mimics mental health disorders, especially paranoid schizophrenia, in many ways.
Not addressed in this book, but perhaps reaching the tipping point of public notice, is how the new conspiracism has taken over the dialogue surrounding serious and fatal dog attacks. It is no longer okay to acknowledge that certain types of dogs, especially those bred for either dogfighting or guarding, have a lower threshold of launching an attack and can cause more serious damage to people or other dogs if they do. A vocal contingent has decided that, for some inexplicable reason, all media outlets hate certain dog breeds and are "lying" when they report on attacks by these animals. They oppose any acknowledgement that these dogs are higher-risk and require specialized care, or even laws designed to protect the dogs themselves from irresponsible ownership and breeding. The result? Skyrocketing dog attacks on Americans and their pets, and animal shelters that are absolutely filled with pit bulls and mastiff-mixes.
Also not addressed in this book, for the reason being that it is too new, are the myriad conspiracies flying around about COVID-19. Anyone who had hoped that the new conspiracism would be a passing fad was quickly disabused of this notion by the President and his supporters' response to the pandemic, a response that is having deadly consequences that we can see in real time.
I agree with the other reviewers who said that this reads like a book-length college thesis and is quite dry, so it might not quite have the reach of more engagingly-presented works.
September 10, 2019
A compendium of the kind of conspiracy thinking that makes up the political landscape of 2019. It'd be laughable that patently idiotic ideas like QAnon or birtherism or Pizzagate need to be addressed at all, but the fact that they're symptoms of a larger trend in American politics is frightening. One you can dedicate a book to, even more so. The book does a fine job of cataloguing these failures of thought and reason, and provides some interesting historical examples worth noting (like turn-of-the-century progressivism as another example of party-hostile populism, except it had ... y'know ... reason involved). The authors' don't dance around the obvious--that the vast majority of the new conspiracism comes from the right, due in no small part to the current occupant of the White House--but they're quick to point out this kind of illogical, baseless, performative aggression will devour both parties and all sides of the political spectrum if left unchecked or worse, embraced by party leaders. No easy answers to be had here, but exhortations for enacting democracy and calling out this kind of conspiracism when you see it are cold comfort when you could burn every hour of every day doing just that while moving no closer to progress.
June 10, 2020
A LOT OF PEOPLE ARE SAYING by Nancy Rosenbaum and Russel Muirhead is good, if slightly out of date, examination of our current conspiracy-laden politics in America. It also points to it as a danger to both our society and our democracy. Overall, it's well-researched polemic.
Core to the book's thesis is Rosenbaum and Muirhead distinguishing between contemporary conspiracy, which they call "the new conspiracism," with the "classic conspiracy theorists." Classical conspiracy theorists base their ideas on documentary evidence, while the new conspiracists just allege things with no evidence.
Examples. Classic conspiracy theorists deal with facts and try to find "patterns which connect." Consider how many classic conspiracy theorists have dissected the JFK assassination footage, and churned and re-churned the documentary evidence. Many have "found" evidence of a second shooter. Others have "found" evidence of CIA involvement. Or have "found" this shred of evidence that "shows" that the mafia had a hand. Etc.
Sure, they're often wrong. Because real journalists are incentivized to follow those leads, and since they make their livings and stake their reputations investigating things that can lead to Pulitzer Prizes and lucrative book deals, so they've probably investigated those trails and found nothing. But that does not matter since classical conspiracy theorists, while often sort of goofy, at least stick to the evidence.
The "new conspiracies," however, operate in a different plane of existence. Because instead of evidence, it's based on innuendo. Consider, for instance, Pizzagate, where "conspiracist entrepreneurs," people who profit off of these things, like Alex Jones claimed that Hillary Clinton and John Podesta were running a pedophilic sex-trafficking ring from the basement of a Washington DC pizzeria. Even saying it sounds stupid, and yet thousands of people shared this conspiracy. Many took it seriously, one going so far as to storm the pizzeria with an assault rifle. Only to discover, before surrendering to the police, that the pizzeria had no basement.
Unlike the JFK conspiracies, Pizzagate was not based on evidence. There were no complaints from children, no children ever emerged saying that Hillary or Podesta molested them, no arrests of adults with children purchased at said pizzeria, things you wold expect if a real criminal sex ring existed. And yet Alex Jones and the like [she'd the narrative. It mushroomed, despite having no evidence.
Why? Because instead of pointing to a time-mark in a video, or a particular paragraph in the Warren Comission's report into JFK's assassination, Pizzagate is pure innuendo. in fact, the only thing you need to say to grain credence for the new conspiracists is the phrase, "people are saying."
For instance, "people are saying that Barack Obama was born in Kenya," obviously false since he provided his long-form birth certificate from HI in 2008 and 2012. But people plugged into the conspiracist nework somehow believe.
Rosenbaum and Muirhead go on to illustrate how disastrous this is to our democratic institutions, Because the new conspiracism infects only the regular people but real politicians. Consider, for instance, how many politicians rushed to pass bills against Sharia law in the early aughts... despite the fact that no one was proposing that, and that the "Establishment Clause" of the constitution already forbids a theocratic government. Or the cirucs around Jade Helm 15, that had the governor of Texas denouncing a "military takeover of Texas"... of which there was no evidence, since it was quite obviously a standard military exercise.
All told, this would have made a good article, or series of articles in a good mainstream publication with heft, like maybe The Economist or The Nation. But the insights wear thin over the course of a book. What's more, they do galnce over some salient reasons why the American right has been relying on conspiracy theories for decades: the right-wing media echo-chamber, quite often bolstered by a racist, white nationalist subtext.
Three-stars.
Core to the book's thesis is Rosenbaum and Muirhead distinguishing between contemporary conspiracy, which they call "the new conspiracism," with the "classic conspiracy theorists." Classical conspiracy theorists base their ideas on documentary evidence, while the new conspiracists just allege things with no evidence.
Examples. Classic conspiracy theorists deal with facts and try to find "patterns which connect." Consider how many classic conspiracy theorists have dissected the JFK assassination footage, and churned and re-churned the documentary evidence. Many have "found" evidence of a second shooter. Others have "found" evidence of CIA involvement. Or have "found" this shred of evidence that "shows" that the mafia had a hand. Etc.
Sure, they're often wrong. Because real journalists are incentivized to follow those leads, and since they make their livings and stake their reputations investigating things that can lead to Pulitzer Prizes and lucrative book deals, so they've probably investigated those trails and found nothing. But that does not matter since classical conspiracy theorists, while often sort of goofy, at least stick to the evidence.
The "new conspiracies," however, operate in a different plane of existence. Because instead of evidence, it's based on innuendo. Consider, for instance, Pizzagate, where "conspiracist entrepreneurs," people who profit off of these things, like Alex Jones claimed that Hillary Clinton and John Podesta were running a pedophilic sex-trafficking ring from the basement of a Washington DC pizzeria. Even saying it sounds stupid, and yet thousands of people shared this conspiracy. Many took it seriously, one going so far as to storm the pizzeria with an assault rifle. Only to discover, before surrendering to the police, that the pizzeria had no basement.
Unlike the JFK conspiracies, Pizzagate was not based on evidence. There were no complaints from children, no children ever emerged saying that Hillary or Podesta molested them, no arrests of adults with children purchased at said pizzeria, things you wold expect if a real criminal sex ring existed. And yet Alex Jones and the like [she'd the narrative. It mushroomed, despite having no evidence.
Why? Because instead of pointing to a time-mark in a video, or a particular paragraph in the Warren Comission's report into JFK's assassination, Pizzagate is pure innuendo. in fact, the only thing you need to say to grain credence for the new conspiracists is the phrase, "people are saying."
For instance, "people are saying that Barack Obama was born in Kenya," obviously false since he provided his long-form birth certificate from HI in 2008 and 2012. But people plugged into the conspiracist nework somehow believe.
Rosenbaum and Muirhead go on to illustrate how disastrous this is to our democratic institutions, Because the new conspiracism infects only the regular people but real politicians. Consider, for instance, how many politicians rushed to pass bills against Sharia law in the early aughts... despite the fact that no one was proposing that, and that the "Establishment Clause" of the constitution already forbids a theocratic government. Or the cirucs around Jade Helm 15, that had the governor of Texas denouncing a "military takeover of Texas"... of which there was no evidence, since it was quite obviously a standard military exercise.
All told, this would have made a good article, or series of articles in a good mainstream publication with heft, like maybe The Economist or The Nation. But the insights wear thin over the course of a book. What's more, they do galnce over some salient reasons why the American right has been relying on conspiracy theories for decades: the right-wing media echo-chamber, quite often bolstered by a racist, white nationalist subtext.
Three-stars.
September 8, 2020
This book starts with a decent, but not particularly groundbreaking observation, that there's a new type of conspiracism that seeks to merely raises questions rather than offer alternative explanations, but after that is loses the plot. The first error the authors make is showing very limited interest in exploring the source of the 'new conspiracism,' which leads to fault analysis of what it really is and what its impacts will be. Having handwaved away trying to explain the source of the problem they spend three chapters explaining what it is, this ends up mostly feeling like a exegesis one on of Trump's foilbles, almost like they're trying to cash in on the anti-Trump books to be honest, which is fine and he's obviously awful but the exploration would be better with less Trump and more about how it works among the regular population. Then they spend three chapter explaining why legitimacy, which they've, accurately, shown is undermined by 'new conspiracy.' A defense of legitimacy is fine and good, but frankly they do it in a hamfisted way that irritated even me, someone that basically agrees with them though I'm obviously more left wing than the authors. Finally they don't really have any solutions other than things that won't happen, Republicans speaking up, and they, my only mild delight in this book, do admit that transperancy and truth won't work. They also slam Cass Sunstein's idea for secret counter agents, which is good. I wanted a book that explained how the new conspiracism came to be, how it works and is affecting politics and people, and what it's impacts will be. I got nothing on the first account, a mediocre effort on the second, and a less than mediocre of the third. You're better off reading a review of the book or finding an interview with the authors.
My feeling is that the new conspiracism is rooted in the material alienation wrought by neoliberalism, networked communication online wrecking the traditional means of reinforcing truth, and the internet overloading people with true and false information to the point that discerning what is true and worth believing is too much work. The material conditions have embedded in people a degree of cynicism and skepticism of institutions and combined with the potent force of information overload and the destruction of traditional means of defining truth people are living in an information wasteland choosing to believe and half believe whatever seems likely or should be true.
My feeling is that the new conspiracism is rooted in the material alienation wrought by neoliberalism, networked communication online wrecking the traditional means of reinforcing truth, and the internet overloading people with true and false information to the point that discerning what is true and worth believing is too much work. The material conditions have embedded in people a degree of cynicism and skepticism of institutions and combined with the potent force of information overload and the destruction of traditional means of defining truth people are living in an information wasteland choosing to believe and half believe whatever seems likely or should be true.
April 26, 2021
In A Lot of People Are Saying, Muirhead and Rosenblum present a theory of what they call the new conspiracism. I don't know that I entirely agree with their distinction between conspiracism and conspiracy theories, but a lot can be learned here.
Muirhead and Rosenblum argue that conspiracy “theories” offer a theory and attempt to uphold journalistic standards in their proofs. But what we see now are just assertions. “The election is rigged!” Very little evidence is required if you can get a bunch of retweets. This is why conspiracists offer vague proofs like “Well, a lot of people are saying X, so I don’t know. Did X happen? I'm not saying it did. But it could have happened.” I'm not sure I buy this distinction. First, this spinning up a possible lie to the assertion that it's possibly true to the assertion that it's definitely true feels to me like the George W. Bush administration all over again. Something is on Fox in the morning and by the evening, it's crazy that Democrats would even question it. And what is the grand theory of the moon landing hoax that is so much more all encompassing than the idea that the Charlottesville massacre was a "false flag?" I’m not sure the moon landing hoax evidence is aspiring to journalist standards, either. Instead, it seems like just another form of titillation, maybe not different from “a lot of people are saying.”
What explains these new conspiracies? Of the answers offered by Muirhead and Rosenblum, these ones strike me as the best.
-It seems likely to me that what we’re seeing is, first, a media effect. Anyone can post pretty much anything and anyone can point to anything as supporting their claims—yes that includes ridiculous assertions from DT. But it also includes all sorts of propaganda machines, including Russian sources. One solution here is for social media companies to take on a gatekeeping role, and in fact when Reddit did that (see Marantz's Antisocial), it mostly worked. FWIW, Facebook's gatekeeping still seems pretty weak, imho.
-I think we’re, second, seeing an aesthetic effect. Conspiracists, in my experience, include all sorts of crazy talk from, sorry, old people in coffee shops who would rather feel agitated by Fox News or riled up by some post on Facebook. Both of those feelings are more entertaining than idle boredom. But it’s not just old people melting their minds looking at video nonsense. When we look at kids who are “red pilled,” we should pay at least some attention to the aesthetic experience being offered by the red pill moment. There is a sense of awe, inclusion, and maybe also ironic joy. If it seems odd, I wonder if it’s a tiny bit similar to reading a Malcolm Gladwell book. Gladwell’s books are full of overstated claims, and sometimes of nonsense, but they always have an ironic lilt and a counter intuitive “wow!” They’re very inviting books to read, too. If that seems ungenerous to Gladwell, then maybe watch JFK again. It's more thrilling than the lone shooter theory.
-If gatekeepers are a contributing solution, those gatekeepers will have to include the political class. So far, I see them as mostly failing.
-It's harder to dispel a lie than it is tell one.
-I worry that, fifth, the trust required to communicate with others has become harder to maintain. One lady in my network regularly posts things like “you can’t tell me the election wasn’t rigged” and her conservative friends all commend her while people like me, sorry, roll our eyes with disgust and contempt. So when I talk to people like this, I have to work to take care to put the burden of proof on their outlandish claims rather than trying to disprove whatever craziness they’ve dug out of some dark web source or walled garden. Further, confrontational communication works better in one-on-one in-person contexts.
-Next, we should acknowledge that we don't know things because it's impossible to know everything. It’s very hard to explain how a vaccine works, for example, and in the last year I’ve learned that there are all sorts of strategies a vaccine can use. Members of my family have gone from mRNA vaccines are radical and risky to being the best vaccine, for example. We read about vaccines every day, and yet I don't think many people can really explain how they work with much specificity. At some margin, we have to trust our experts, and yet they so often seem so wealthy, corrupt, and/ or self-serving. Further, let's imagine a young man who is asked to admit how much he doesn't know about everything from climate change to talking to girls to the physics of the space exploration. Wouldn't it feel better to dismiss all of it with a magical assertion and instead assert that what he watched in a youtube video is right?
-Finally, I suspect motivated reasoning and confirmation bias explain a lot of these preferences. I note, to give just one example, that many old people would rather believe that the next generation, for a variety of reasons, is decadent or soft or going to hell in a hand basket. Many of my older friends and family members struggle to believe it’s not the 1970s anymore, and it would be easier to believe that confounding changes represent moral decay rather than progress or even just some mix of the two.
Muirhead and Rosenblum argue that the consequence of all this conspiracy stuff is a delegitimization of democratic institutions and ideals. I’m not sure what to do at a social level beyond insisting on powerful people and groups taking more responsibility for their platforms and followings. At the individual level, I suggest that people 1) talk in person 2) talk one on one and 3) disagree clearly. “No, I don’t believe that at all. I’m surprised that you’d say that” is often the most useful thing I can say. Finally, people don't revise their habits all at once. It takes time. This problem has not gone away, I think, and so I'd finally encourage liberals to run for minor political offices rather than posting book reviews on goodreads.
Connected reads
Notes.
Muirhead and Rosenblum argue that conspiracy “theories” offer a theory and attempt to uphold journalistic standards in their proofs. But what we see now are just assertions. “The election is rigged!” Very little evidence is required if you can get a bunch of retweets. This is why conspiracists offer vague proofs like “Well, a lot of people are saying X, so I don’t know. Did X happen? I'm not saying it did. But it could have happened.” I'm not sure I buy this distinction. First, this spinning up a possible lie to the assertion that it's possibly true to the assertion that it's definitely true feels to me like the George W. Bush administration all over again. Something is on Fox in the morning and by the evening, it's crazy that Democrats would even question it. And what is the grand theory of the moon landing hoax that is so much more all encompassing than the idea that the Charlottesville massacre was a "false flag?" I’m not sure the moon landing hoax evidence is aspiring to journalist standards, either. Instead, it seems like just another form of titillation, maybe not different from “a lot of people are saying.”
What explains these new conspiracies? Of the answers offered by Muirhead and Rosenblum, these ones strike me as the best.
-It seems likely to me that what we’re seeing is, first, a media effect. Anyone can post pretty much anything and anyone can point to anything as supporting their claims—yes that includes ridiculous assertions from DT. But it also includes all sorts of propaganda machines, including Russian sources. One solution here is for social media companies to take on a gatekeeping role, and in fact when Reddit did that (see Marantz's Antisocial), it mostly worked. FWIW, Facebook's gatekeeping still seems pretty weak, imho.
-I think we’re, second, seeing an aesthetic effect. Conspiracists, in my experience, include all sorts of crazy talk from, sorry, old people in coffee shops who would rather feel agitated by Fox News or riled up by some post on Facebook. Both of those feelings are more entertaining than idle boredom. But it’s not just old people melting their minds looking at video nonsense. When we look at kids who are “red pilled,” we should pay at least some attention to the aesthetic experience being offered by the red pill moment. There is a sense of awe, inclusion, and maybe also ironic joy. If it seems odd, I wonder if it’s a tiny bit similar to reading a Malcolm Gladwell book. Gladwell’s books are full of overstated claims, and sometimes of nonsense, but they always have an ironic lilt and a counter intuitive “wow!” They’re very inviting books to read, too. If that seems ungenerous to Gladwell, then maybe watch JFK again. It's more thrilling than the lone shooter theory.
-If gatekeepers are a contributing solution, those gatekeepers will have to include the political class. So far, I see them as mostly failing.
-It's harder to dispel a lie than it is tell one.
-I worry that, fifth, the trust required to communicate with others has become harder to maintain. One lady in my network regularly posts things like “you can’t tell me the election wasn’t rigged” and her conservative friends all commend her while people like me, sorry, roll our eyes with disgust and contempt. So when I talk to people like this, I have to work to take care to put the burden of proof on their outlandish claims rather than trying to disprove whatever craziness they’ve dug out of some dark web source or walled garden. Further, confrontational communication works better in one-on-one in-person contexts.
-Next, we should acknowledge that we don't know things because it's impossible to know everything. It’s very hard to explain how a vaccine works, for example, and in the last year I’ve learned that there are all sorts of strategies a vaccine can use. Members of my family have gone from mRNA vaccines are radical and risky to being the best vaccine, for example. We read about vaccines every day, and yet I don't think many people can really explain how they work with much specificity. At some margin, we have to trust our experts, and yet they so often seem so wealthy, corrupt, and/ or self-serving. Further, let's imagine a young man who is asked to admit how much he doesn't know about everything from climate change to talking to girls to the physics of the space exploration. Wouldn't it feel better to dismiss all of it with a magical assertion and instead assert that what he watched in a youtube video is right?
-Finally, I suspect motivated reasoning and confirmation bias explain a lot of these preferences. I note, to give just one example, that many old people would rather believe that the next generation, for a variety of reasons, is decadent or soft or going to hell in a hand basket. Many of my older friends and family members struggle to believe it’s not the 1970s anymore, and it would be easier to believe that confounding changes represent moral decay rather than progress or even just some mix of the two.
Muirhead and Rosenblum argue that the consequence of all this conspiracy stuff is a delegitimization of democratic institutions and ideals. I’m not sure what to do at a social level beyond insisting on powerful people and groups taking more responsibility for their platforms and followings. At the individual level, I suggest that people 1) talk in person 2) talk one on one and 3) disagree clearly. “No, I don’t believe that at all. I’m surprised that you’d say that” is often the most useful thing I can say. Finally, people don't revise their habits all at once. It takes time. This problem has not gone away, I think, and so I'd finally encourage liberals to run for minor political offices rather than posting book reviews on goodreads.
Connected reads
Notes.
October 19, 2021
"Some put their trust in a community of scientists and public health officials who affirm that vaccines do not cause autism; others put their trust in an internet community of anonymous conspiracists who affirm that Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman is running an international child sex-trafficking ring our of a pizzeria. What is the difference?"
Pretty much your go-to guide for understanding why your retired uncle believes that high-ranking government officials run sex trafficking rings out of Beltway pizzerias and why millions of Americans blanket-deny such foolery as "facts" and "expertise".
In fact, that's really what the bulk of this crucial work is about, trying to understanding how millions of Americans basically no longer recognize any feasible reality or even common sense and think themselves into an inescapable corner of insanity where one is forced to ask, Who owns reality?
The authors approach these issues methodically and have a pretty simple breakdown of what might seem to be both a complex and infuriating psychological miasma, but they keep it succinct. People's brains and psyches are infected by a kind of rot that they call "conspiracy without theory". The authors make a distinction between "classical" conspiracy theory which actually utilizes at least a coherency of attempted rationalization and epistemic validation, if misguided. In other words, conspiracy theorists at least adhere to a version of reality and attempt to rationalize it through some kind of evidence. The new conspiracism, though, is a reality-bashing anarchic free-for-all, where simply saying "It might not be true but it's true enough" or "a lot of people are saying" is all you need to shape your own individual reality.
There isn't even any political theory or knowledge base for the new conspiracism, it really is just a free-for-all clusterfuck of assertion grounded in nothing more than "it might be true...". It centers more on tribal belief, the inability to admit you are wrong/made a poor choice, the denigration of any kind of expertise, especially institutional, and is a kind of crass barbaric method of universe construction that can lead only to very bad things.
Can't recommend this enough!
Pretty much your go-to guide for understanding why your retired uncle believes that high-ranking government officials run sex trafficking rings out of Beltway pizzerias and why millions of Americans blanket-deny such foolery as "facts" and "expertise".
In fact, that's really what the bulk of this crucial work is about, trying to understanding how millions of Americans basically no longer recognize any feasible reality or even common sense and think themselves into an inescapable corner of insanity where one is forced to ask, Who owns reality?
The authors approach these issues methodically and have a pretty simple breakdown of what might seem to be both a complex and infuriating psychological miasma, but they keep it succinct. People's brains and psyches are infected by a kind of rot that they call "conspiracy without theory". The authors make a distinction between "classical" conspiracy theory which actually utilizes at least a coherency of attempted rationalization and epistemic validation, if misguided. In other words, conspiracy theorists at least adhere to a version of reality and attempt to rationalize it through some kind of evidence. The new conspiracism, though, is a reality-bashing anarchic free-for-all, where simply saying "It might not be true but it's true enough" or "a lot of people are saying" is all you need to shape your own individual reality.
There isn't even any political theory or knowledge base for the new conspiracism, it really is just a free-for-all clusterfuck of assertion grounded in nothing more than "it might be true...". It centers more on tribal belief, the inability to admit you are wrong/made a poor choice, the denigration of any kind of expertise, especially institutional, and is a kind of crass barbaric method of universe construction that can lead only to very bad things.
Can't recommend this enough!
January 6, 2020
This is a short and academic approach to the issue of conspiracy theories with the requisite starting point from Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”. It’s not so academic as to be unapproachable by the uninitiated such as myself, but it really doesn’t go into enough depth and background on how we’ve come to this sorry state of affairs, nor ultimately what to do about it. This is a huge problem in the US and it seems to be getting worse year in and year out with no solution in sight and nothing that the press or chattering class is currently doing seems to be alleviating the situation. It is somewhat interesting to see an intellectual framework developed to discuss the issue while at the same time discussing detail as to what Pizzagate or Q-Anon are (or as best as anyone can decipher what these hare-brained ideas are about). Somewhat informative overall.
Read
September 26, 2019I had the opportunity to talk with Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum for a podcast that I host about democracy. The conversation is a nice companion to the book and draws the connection to democracy a little more directly: https://www.democracyworkspodcast.com...
May 8, 2019
The original thoughts in this book wouldn’t amount to a whole Atlantic article. Repetitive, thin analysis that anybody who has lived through the past few years in America would have been able to do.
August 15, 2021
I will get the negatives out of the way first by saying that this book tends to repeat itself a lot, and I wish their analysis went deeper than just US political considerations, incorporating psychology, sociology, etc. In any case, I still gave it four stars because it does explore why Trump-era conspiracy (“the new conspiracism” as the authors call it) is so different. The fact that the new conspiracism is so lazy that it doesn’t put in the many hours of “connect the dots” research that goes into classic tin-foil hat conspiracism makes it so easy to repeat, understand, and entrench in the public mind. Just saying “Rigged!” is enough; there are no details to be bothered with.
Despite this book being published in 2019, it is shockingly accurate as to how the rest of the Trump presidency would play out, including what would happen if Trump lost and he refused to concede. The accurately predicted that Republicans would quickly get behind the “big lie” of election fraud to stay in side with the base, and thereby entrench the new conspiracism deeper into the national psyche and thereby further erode democracy. Their analysis of how debasing conspiracism has been to knowledge producers like scientists is also chillingly accurate. The authors predicted big battles over vaccines (COVID, here we come!) and climate change (ongoing and worsening) with conspiracism as a foundation in the attack on science and common sense.
This book seeks solutions at the political level, however, not the personal. If you are dealing with conspiracism in your own life, read Escaping the Rabbit Hole instead.
Despite this book being published in 2019, it is shockingly accurate as to how the rest of the Trump presidency would play out, including what would happen if Trump lost and he refused to concede. The accurately predicted that Republicans would quickly get behind the “big lie” of election fraud to stay in side with the base, and thereby entrench the new conspiracism deeper into the national psyche and thereby further erode democracy. Their analysis of how debasing conspiracism has been to knowledge producers like scientists is also chillingly accurate. The authors predicted big battles over vaccines (COVID, here we come!) and climate change (ongoing and worsening) with conspiracism as a foundation in the attack on science and common sense.
This book seeks solutions at the political level, however, not the personal. If you are dealing with conspiracism in your own life, read Escaping the Rabbit Hole instead.
September 18, 2019
A revealing and depressing read. The authors look at the rise of a new kind of conspiracism in the age of Trump -one that abetted his rise to power and which he uses to solidify and maintain (and potentially expand) his power. It has all the classic hallmarks of conspiracy theory - paranoia, scapegoating, outrageous accusations, etc. - but without the theory. There's nothing to debunk because facts don't matter and don't enter into it. It's all about "A lot of people say" or "I've heard" or "I'm only asking questions." And when something is proven false (e.g. when Trump retweets a faked video) it doesn't matter at all. His paid flunky says "The video may be fake but the threat is real."
Most of the book is devoted to showing how this kind of conspiracism has spread, and how complicit both right wing media and the Republican party are. How can we combat it? The authors say the two most important activities are "speaking truth to conspiracy and enacting democracy." But can those activities prevail when you've got the once great Republican Party committed to be toadies for the man who says "What you're seeing and what you're reading is not happening"? I fear this book will be read in years to come as an artifact of the end of democracy in the United States.
Most of the book is devoted to showing how this kind of conspiracism has spread, and how complicit both right wing media and the Republican party are. How can we combat it? The authors say the two most important activities are "speaking truth to conspiracy and enacting democracy." But can those activities prevail when you've got the once great Republican Party committed to be toadies for the man who says "What you're seeing and what you're reading is not happening"? I fear this book will be read in years to come as an artifact of the end of democracy in the United States.
January 26, 2021
This book was such a mixed bag for me. It’s not even long - about 175 pages before you reach the appendices - but so much of it dragged. I am glad I finished it, because I did learn a few things, and some of their analysis was valuable. But the authors took so long and so much repetition to summit Mount What’s Your Point? that it was almost not worth it.
I wish they’d at least waited til after the 2020 election to finish writing it. One of the worst-case-scenarios they described (Trump or his Republican successor refusing to concede), has now happened, surrounded by the exact “new conspiracism” this book describes. If they’d waited til we actually got to that point (and surely they could’ve anticipated it was coming very soon), maybe they could’ve filled out this book with more actual analysis rather than repeating the same things over and over.
I wish they’d at least waited til after the 2020 election to finish writing it. One of the worst-case-scenarios they described (Trump or his Republican successor refusing to concede), has now happened, surrounded by the exact “new conspiracism” this book describes. If they’d waited til we actually got to that point (and surely they could’ve anticipated it was coming very soon), maybe they could’ve filled out this book with more actual analysis rather than repeating the same things over and over.
April 18, 2019
Underwhelming. An extremely centrist take, and some of the arguments rely on a superficial approach to work. The Pizzagate "theory" was ludicrous, but it had some substance, mangled and misunderstood and misplaced as it all was. Dismissing it as the author do means they analyse it wrong, and makes it more difficult to understand how it got traction.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 14, 2020
Pretty disappointing. Does a good job “reporting” what we’ve seen in the last few years but doesn’t go much farther than that. If you’re looking to understand these phenomena rather than simply know about them, this book will leave you unsatisfied.
February 2, 2021
Probably more like 3.5 stars. Some great insights and a fair assessment of our current situation, but I felt like they kept making the same points over and over. Also, they largely wrote about things in a dry, detached manner. When they did use specific examples things got more interesting.
Read
March 16, 2020AudioBook Review:
Stars: Overall 4 Narration 4 Story 5
I honestly didn’t go into this one expecting the many lessons and references to political and sociological theories and thoughts that are within, but those do help, in some ways to explain the (at least to me) comfort level with half-formed ideas, not always based in truth that are running about out there. From Trump’s “It’s a Democratic Hoax” to explain everything from the impeachment (for cause) to the Covid-19 response (inadequate) to the many who still claim the earth is flat, or the moon landing was staged on a set in Hollywood – the theories, and the fact that people who spout them are more intrinsically invested in the idea – true or not to completely flummox those of us who consider ourselves to be rational, thinking, investigating and curious people. Perhaps even, at first, I was hoping for that “magic bullet” to take inane comments and beliefs and turn the spouts of misinformation into a thinking being.
And, to no one’s surprise – there is no magic bullet. There also isn’t a standard conspiracy theorist, as I had commonly believed. In some ways, adherence to a belief in a conspiracy and using the ‘lacks’ that one would need: lack of solid proof, refusal of scientific facts, over-reliance on religion, reliance on social media for ALL news: these all are, in different situations, perhaps preferable to the more malleable or intellectual approach – where evidence helps to form a belief or thought, and this can be altered and adjusted to allow for new evidence. Yet – the initial conclusion here from the authors is one that states that the chaos of the internet (and it is chaos out there) combined with the “first heard version is the hardest to discount” nature of humans - and we have an administration that is thriving on the half-formed, exaggerated or even wholly invented ‘facts and events’, to create the struggles that we see between parties, in the political discourse, and the frustration that many find in the lack of desire to FIND the truth, let alone speak it.
Where this strikes hardest is the reliance that the attackers have to their methods – as distasteful, untrue and even over-stated as they are, and that discourse turning on and degrading the institutions that have been in place since envisioned by the founding fathers – and the ultimate damage that all are doing to both the nation and what we have all grown up believing was an America that was a ‘melting pot’ and welcomed all to the shores – where the dream was available to all – not just the 1%. There are theories and explanations, references to old style “conspiracy theories” and this newer, and I believe more dangerous, new conspiricism of thought as advanced by Trump et al. It took me off into multiple directions to read cited references that I was unfamiliar with, look at different approaches throughout the years, and even taking into account my own bias when I have to ‘grit’ my teeth to deal with the GOP spoutings that even, from the first sentence, I want to pull out the lies – leaving little behind but the play on emotions and the need (we all have it) to feel a part of something. It was an experience that while a lengthy one, left me better for it. Narrated by Katherine Fenton, the text wasn’t a ‘story’ and did often feel like a university lecture – but a lecture that has so many facets that you can’t help but pay attention and take notes. Her voice is clear, consistent and doesn’t ‘drone on’ but allows for the listener to scroll back, research, re-listen and resume with ease.
I received an AudioBook copy of the title from Princeton University Press for purpose of honest review. I was not compensated for this review: all conclusions are my own responsibility.
Review first appeared at I am, Indeed
Stars: Overall 4 Narration 4 Story 5
I honestly didn’t go into this one expecting the many lessons and references to political and sociological theories and thoughts that are within, but those do help, in some ways to explain the (at least to me) comfort level with half-formed ideas, not always based in truth that are running about out there. From Trump’s “It’s a Democratic Hoax” to explain everything from the impeachment (for cause) to the Covid-19 response (inadequate) to the many who still claim the earth is flat, or the moon landing was staged on a set in Hollywood – the theories, and the fact that people who spout them are more intrinsically invested in the idea – true or not to completely flummox those of us who consider ourselves to be rational, thinking, investigating and curious people. Perhaps even, at first, I was hoping for that “magic bullet” to take inane comments and beliefs and turn the spouts of misinformation into a thinking being.
And, to no one’s surprise – there is no magic bullet. There also isn’t a standard conspiracy theorist, as I had commonly believed. In some ways, adherence to a belief in a conspiracy and using the ‘lacks’ that one would need: lack of solid proof, refusal of scientific facts, over-reliance on religion, reliance on social media for ALL news: these all are, in different situations, perhaps preferable to the more malleable or intellectual approach – where evidence helps to form a belief or thought, and this can be altered and adjusted to allow for new evidence. Yet – the initial conclusion here from the authors is one that states that the chaos of the internet (and it is chaos out there) combined with the “first heard version is the hardest to discount” nature of humans - and we have an administration that is thriving on the half-formed, exaggerated or even wholly invented ‘facts and events’, to create the struggles that we see between parties, in the political discourse, and the frustration that many find in the lack of desire to FIND the truth, let alone speak it.
Where this strikes hardest is the reliance that the attackers have to their methods – as distasteful, untrue and even over-stated as they are, and that discourse turning on and degrading the institutions that have been in place since envisioned by the founding fathers – and the ultimate damage that all are doing to both the nation and what we have all grown up believing was an America that was a ‘melting pot’ and welcomed all to the shores – where the dream was available to all – not just the 1%. There are theories and explanations, references to old style “conspiracy theories” and this newer, and I believe more dangerous, new conspiricism of thought as advanced by Trump et al. It took me off into multiple directions to read cited references that I was unfamiliar with, look at different approaches throughout the years, and even taking into account my own bias when I have to ‘grit’ my teeth to deal with the GOP spoutings that even, from the first sentence, I want to pull out the lies – leaving little behind but the play on emotions and the need (we all have it) to feel a part of something. It was an experience that while a lengthy one, left me better for it. Narrated by Katherine Fenton, the text wasn’t a ‘story’ and did often feel like a university lecture – but a lecture that has so many facets that you can’t help but pay attention and take notes. Her voice is clear, consistent and doesn’t ‘drone on’ but allows for the listener to scroll back, research, re-listen and resume with ease.
I received an AudioBook copy of the title from Princeton University Press for purpose of honest review. I was not compensated for this review: all conclusions are my own responsibility.
Review first appeared at I am, Indeed
July 7, 2022
This book offers a slightly different angle of similar thought lines, as in Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power and How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations with Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason. A central take-away is this: conspiracism (minus any real "theory") is not the same as skepticism. It's one thing to be hesitant to believe in a system. It's another to maniacally seek its destruction without any proposed new system in its place.
"A Lot of People are Saying" is one of several books published right before the 2020 election that demands a new edition to catch readers up with real life. There's an eerie few paragraphs in its epilogue where Muirhead predicts a non-peaceful transfer of power based solely on Trump's shenanigans from the 2016 election in which he won. I have such respect for these polysci wonks that so keenly see the writing on the wall.
"A Lot of People are Saying" is one of several books published right before the 2020 election that demands a new edition to catch readers up with real life. There's an eerie few paragraphs in its epilogue where Muirhead predicts a non-peaceful transfer of power based solely on Trump's shenanigans from the 2016 election in which he won. I have such respect for these polysci wonks that so keenly see the writing on the wall.
March 2, 2021
More of a political manifesto than a academic book about a new kind of conspirational thinking. The observations about the new conspirational thinking and its theoretification are interesting and sharp, but they are explored in the first chapter. Then the rest of the book is mostly about examples of this conspirational thinking, how Trump and Republicans are bad and democracy is at risk. So this book was mostly a boring read. I did not take this book because i hate Trump or want to hate him. I took to read about the new conspirascist thinking.
For an academic book this was a bad book with some factual errors, like the false claim of Henry Ford as the writer of the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
For an academic book this was a bad book with some factual errors, like the false claim of Henry Ford as the writer of the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
March 1, 2023
Insightful read comparing and contrasting the old versus new conspiracy. The latter of which consumes most of the media and conservative political groups today. The authors break this concept down with new conspiracy being particularly insidious given its “proof” being only pure assertion (e.g, “a lot of people are saying”). The final portion of the book presents a compelling argument to address conspiracy especially as letting it fester will continue to foster divides in our country and rot the foundations of democracy in the U.S. and abroad.
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May 1, 2021This book scrutinizes the nature of the new strand of conspìracism. Whereas before conspiracies sought credibility by laying claim to excessive detective work of redacted evidence from unorthodox sources, the new conspiracies seeks to gain momentum and social sanction through brute repetition on social media without making any reference to purported evidence. Whereas conspiracies before were motivated by a sense of 'proportionality ' or a powerful còntrolling design to large-scale historic events, the new conspiracies are motivated by an impulse to defend and keep certain partisan authoritarians in power. Whereas before, political losers spouted conspiracies, nowadays political winners do so in a strange mix of victimization and aggrandizement that keeps supporters in thrall and hateful of the other side. Whereas before lies are transmitted to be believed, nowadays lies are transmitted to be affirmed without the need for belief- a cynical ploy or recited creed to show submission to the authoritarian and to display subscription to a certain shared worldview. Whereas before conspiracists would claim to investigate nitty gritty details, such as the engineering infrastructure of world trade center during 9/11, nowadays conspiracists ground their most central beliefs in takes that sound 'true enough' just because they validate their worldview. Yet these new conspiracists are the first to call themselves non-sheeple or critical thinkers, ignoring the paradox that they don't wrestle with any skeptical, evidence-based challenges to their affirmed faith. This is a very good academic book if one is interested in explorations of these issues. It is a bit repetitive and not outstandingly original in its coverage of the news, but definitely worth reading.
December 6, 2019
“A Lot of People Ae Saying” is an excellent, i if deeply disturbing book. Authors, Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum, political science professors at Dartmouth and Harvard, respectively, have done citizens of our fragile democracy willing to read this book a great service. They tackle a phenomenon that has caused this reviewer no end of frustration, angst, and frankly intellectual trauma over the past few years. The authors have dubbed this phenomenon ‘new conspiracism.’ In contrast to traditional conspiracy theories, with which we are all familiar, ‘new conspiracism’ has no ‘theory;’ it does not require evidence nor seek explanation. ‘New conspiracism’ rests solely on simple assertion, and is validated not by proofs, but by blind acceptance and repetition. There is no need, nor desire, to build a series theoretical of connecting dots (evidence) to form the conspiracy (bald assertion), it is built out of ether. The assertion alone is sufficient ‘proof’ for the assertion, and it isn’t meant to provide an explanation of misdeeds to be corrected. While traditional conspiracy theories can be ‘crazy,’ we all know some reflect reality and provide true clarity. ‘New conspiracism’ need not have any - and in fact usually doesn’t - basis in reality. As such, the sole purpose of these latter conspiracies is to delegitimize a particular target and to disorient the public. ‘New conspiracism’ is meant to replace reality with an alternative one constructed out of whole cloth; to replace our ‘common sense’ of the world with the new conspiracists alternative constructed reality. And the greatest new conspiracist of all, the Conspiracist-in-Chief, is our 45th President, Donald J. Trump. As an empirical experimental scientist who prizes the constraints of evidence and reality above all else, no wonder this reviewer has felt disoriented and off balance since the rise of Trump and Trumpism.
Muirhead and Rosenblum expertly boil down the differences between traditional conspiracy theory and ‘new conspiracism;’ show how ‘new conspiracism’ works, how it is used, by who and why many in our society are especially prone to it; how our President has made ‘new conspiracism’ his go-to approach to consolidate and maintain power; how ‘new conspiracism’ delegitimizes our democracy and disorients our citizens; and finally how we, who live in the real world, can combat ‘new conspiracism’ and its destructive influences on our now fragile democracy. This is all done without hysteria (though the topic is disturbing and somewhat depressing) or hype, and in less than 200 pages of formal text (sans notes). This reviewer feels forever changed intellectually after reading “A Lot of People are Saying;” I am now more prepared to see and combat the constructed dystopian reality our Conspiracist-in-Chief and his followers wish us all to adopt. I can not recommend this book highly enough. Can we give 6 stars?!!
Muirhead and Rosenblum expertly boil down the differences between traditional conspiracy theory and ‘new conspiracism;’ show how ‘new conspiracism’ works, how it is used, by who and why many in our society are especially prone to it; how our President has made ‘new conspiracism’ his go-to approach to consolidate and maintain power; how ‘new conspiracism’ delegitimizes our democracy and disorients our citizens; and finally how we, who live in the real world, can combat ‘new conspiracism’ and its destructive influences on our now fragile democracy. This is all done without hysteria (though the topic is disturbing and somewhat depressing) or hype, and in less than 200 pages of formal text (sans notes). This reviewer feels forever changed intellectually after reading “A Lot of People are Saying;” I am now more prepared to see and combat the constructed dystopian reality our Conspiracist-in-Chief and his followers wish us all to adopt. I can not recommend this book highly enough. Can we give 6 stars?!!
September 28, 2019
In their book, the authors introduce what they call the "new conspiracism," which has emerged in the Trump era. While traditional conspiracy has some basis in facts and evidence, the new conspiracism relies solely on rhetorical power and repetition of assertions like "rigged" or "fake news" to counter anything that they - the conspiracists - do not like about mainstream news and/or traditional institutions like universities and government agencies. The new conspiracism has been adopted and stoked by the Republicans under the leadership of Donald Trump in order to rile up their base, helping them win elections.
Donald Trump has exploited the American people's simmering fears and distrust of traditional American institutions that, however imperfect, make up our formal democracy. The result is, according to the authors, disorientation. American political life is now becoming more and more chaotic as people are confused about whom to trust about what's happening in the country and in the world. Trump then has seized and highlighted this confusion and disorientation and goes on to claim that he is the one to be trusted, he alone will fix things - he alone will "drain the swamp" of corrupt elites who are "conspiring" to harm the American people.
In the last section, the authors offer some solutions to counter the new conspiracism. Though their book mainly explores the problem more than offering solutions.
Donald Trump has exploited the American people's simmering fears and distrust of traditional American institutions that, however imperfect, make up our formal democracy. The result is, according to the authors, disorientation. American political life is now becoming more and more chaotic as people are confused about whom to trust about what's happening in the country and in the world. Trump then has seized and highlighted this confusion and disorientation and goes on to claim that he is the one to be trusted, he alone will fix things - he alone will "drain the swamp" of corrupt elites who are "conspiring" to harm the American people.
In the last section, the authors offer some solutions to counter the new conspiracism. Though their book mainly explores the problem more than offering solutions.
September 20, 2023
A lot of people are saying this book is good. I was unimpressed. The book's general idea is that "democracy" is uniquely threatened by what they authors (Harvard prof Nancy L. Rosenblum and Dartmouth prof Russell Muirhead) call the "New Conspiricism". Which generates (they say) imaginary conspiracies that lack a conspiracy theory. Conspiracists (they say) make it up as they go along, tossing out dark allegations without the slightest effort at marshalling evidence, connecting the dots, not even setting up the corkboards with ragtag newspaper clippings, pushpins, and red yarn.
The paperback edition, which I read from the Portsmouth Public Library, is dated 2019. So it misses Covid, the 2020 election, and January 6. What a field day the authors could have had with those! As it is, their examples of "conspiricism" are kind of weak and repetitive. Exhibit A is Pizzagate, deserving of a dozen separate index entries. There's Jade Helm with six entries. And the authors take special care to mention the various plots alleged by the "conspiracist in chief", Donald Trump: birtherism, 2016 election fraud (denying him the popular vote win he thought he deserved), Ted Cruz's dad was involved in JFK's assassination, and more.
So many more.
The obvious thing about Trump is that he's a bullshitter, prone to throwing off self-serving evidence-free nonsense from the top of his head. The authors (to their minor credit) do mention Harry Frankfurt's classic On Bullshit, only to deny the obvious: it's necessary to their thesis to make Trump a conspiracist, not a mere bullshitter. I thought their argument here was unconvincing.
Muirhead and Rosenblum also go out of their way to distinguish the "new conspiracism" with "classic" conspiracy theorizing. The new conspiracism is (again) "conspiracy without a theory", which is a punchy, soundbite-friendly, allegation that is mostly (I thought) handwaving. It would be damned odd if (somehow) humanity's well-known mental foibles, evolved over millennia, suddenly developed an entirely new channel for fallacy and fabulism. And damned odd if that mind-virus infected only one political inclination.
But it's necessary for the authors to associate the "new conspiracism" with Republicans. In order to do that, they (more or less) hammer on the facts of recent history to make them fit their model.
They have to ignore (for example) Hillary Clinton's deeming Trump an "illegitimate president". (And the Republican National Committee compiled a helpful history of Democrat election denialism, equally ignored by the authors.)
What the authors seem to miss entirely is the cause of this sort of thing. The best explicator I've seen in recent years is Martin Gurri, whose thesis is that the public is increasingly fed up with the smug arrogance of "elites". Muirhead and Rosenblum are total fans of the elites, but (in plain fact) they have squandered whatever trust we once placed in them.
(Pun Salad blog posts referencing Gurri, most with quotes, may be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. That penultimate link observes that this book might have been a lot better if the authors had read Gurri first.)
But let's give the authors (some) credit. Their concluding chapter outlines a "worst-case scenario" of where this might all be leading. And their description is actually pretty close to what happened after the 2020 election. Their thesis is shaky, but their prognostication is strong.
Not that it matters, but the Dartmouth author, Russell Muirhead, is also a representative in the New Hampshire House. The latest ratings from the New Hampshire Liberty Alliance score him (with 103 other reps) as a "Constitutional Threat". So he's a fan of "democracy", fine, but liberty? Not so much.
And their institutions? Muirhead's Dartmouth is ranked #240 out of 248 colleges in the latest ratings from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. And Rosenblum's Harvard? Dead last at #248.
The authors probably don't have a lot of influence over their employers' speech policies. It would have been nice if they'd shown the slightest awareness of the censoriousness of elite institutions, as typified by their own.
January 6, 2025
The authors distinguish between conspiracy theory and what they call “conspiricism” which is bald assertion without any theory behind it or effort to provide supportive data. This has hollowed out democracy by deligitimating democratic institutions and causing psychological disorientation in the public. There is also a significant partisan penumbra associated with it as Republicans are much more likely to engage in this practice. To combat it and strengthen our democracy, the authors advocate 1) speaking truth to conspiricism, and 2) enacting democracy to make it more legible for citizens.
For more suggestions about what can be done to undergird our precious democracy, I recommend “Strengthening American Democracy:Reflection, Action, and Reform”. (https://broadviewpress.com/product/st...).
For more suggestions about what can be done to undergird our precious democracy, I recommend “Strengthening American Democracy:Reflection, Action, and Reform”. (https://broadviewpress.com/product/st...).
June 17, 2019
A short book and to the point about the plague of conspiracist thinking that infects the modern digitally connecte world. Among my many objections to the vile Donald Trump is his conspiracism and attacks on the press and on reality itself with his constant gas-lighting. This is exactly what the authors of this book address: the deliberate poisoning of truth with lies by this disgusting man and especially the damage it does to democratic societies which fundamentally run on trust and a balance of powers, things Trump and his enablers constantly seek to undermine. An important book in my view.
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