(Source: MIRS.news, Published 07/01/2022) “I want to believe”
The words appeared below a UFO on the poster made famous by the popular '90s science-fiction television show The X-Files, but those words also sum up the pervasiveness of conspiracy theories written out by many America First candidates running to be on the November ballot.
Several candidates responded in surveys collected by a conservative grassroots activist that widespread election fraud cost Donald Trump the 2020 election and that Jan. 6 was a setup by the “deep state.”
Gary Mitchell, running in Kalamazoo County, references the “New World Order” several times in his survey posted by America First activist Debra ELL, adding that he wants to take education back from the “New World Order.” Mitchell cites Dinesh D’Souza’s movie “2000 Mules” as direct evidence that Trump had the 2020 election stolen from him.
“The election was stolen by electronic vote fraud from local to international levels involving the Vatican, Red China and several NATO nations via encrypted DaVinci satellites, including COVID excuse absentee voting,” wrote James Chapman, running for the 4th Senate District in Wayne County.
Robert Saler, associate dean for evaluation and assistant professor of religion and culture at Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis, defined conspiracy as, “a secret arrangement between two or more actors to usurp political or economic power, violate established rights, hoard vital secrets, or unlawfully alter government institutions."
Speaking on the MIRS Monday podcast, Saler said that differs from a conspiracy theory, which is "a proposed explanation of historical, ongoing, or future events that cites as a main causal factor a small group of powerful persons, the conspirators, acting in secret for their own benefit against the common good.”
“We are living in such anxious, uncertain times where we don’t feel like we have a lot of control, so that is a perfect breeding ground for conspiracy theories,” said Sue Ellen Christian, 2021-2024 presidential innovation in communication professor at Western Michigan University.
Popular media, like the X-Files and other conspiracy-based television shows, mouthpieces for conspiracy theories such as Alex Jones and D’Souza; and the whole smorgasbord of QAnon conspiracy theories have slowly steeped mainstream thought in conspiratorial thinking.
“They can either make the complicated world seem very simple or it can make uncomfortably simple facts seem complicated,” Saler said.
Christian said one of the difficulties about disproving conspiracy theories is that they are unprovable, because they contain a secret or mystery. However, she said, conspiracies that turn out to be real, such as the Watergate scandal in 1972, are undone because of those same secrets.
“Because secrets are so hard to keep,” she said.
Saler said they can be tied deeply with Christian Nationalism and receive support from the growing Alt-Right and reactionary Populist political movements. Both Saler and Christian said conspiracy theories can be highly partisan issues.
“Nothing is immune to political polarization and polarization right now,” Saler said.
Q-Anon theories pervade the current political climate with at least 56 America First candidates, as well as other candidates like Matt DePerno, Kristina Karamo, Ryan Kelley, Garrett Soldano, Tudor Dixon and Kevin Rinke, espousing some facet of Q-Anon conspiracy theories. Many of them have said they are not connected to QAnon.
“Even people who are fairly invested in it might say ‘No’ because what they have in mind is the entire complex of the mythology: adrenochrome is being harvested from children, lizard people, deep state, George SOROS,” Saler said.
Saler said the whole QAnon phenomenon, which came from message boards like 8Chan and 4Chan, is a leaderless concept, which makes it hard to get rid of, and allows people to pick and choose the bits they want like a smorgasbord.
“The thing about QAnon is you don’t have to buy into the whole thing,” he said.
As an example, he said there was a campaign from QAnon that talked about finding missing or trafficked children that led people into the world of conspiracy theory.
“Who wouldn’t be against combating human and child trafficking? But we now see that was a steppingstone towards drawing people into the idea, which has been present in QAnon from the beginning, that somehow there are these pedophiles doing horrible things to children at the base of this ‘deep state’ opposition to President Trump,” he said.
This introduced the idea of “grooming” into the political discourse, which is a direct link to the QAnon pedophile idea that elites are harvesting pituitary glands from babies in strange satanic rituals to get a drug called adrenochrome.
That message isn’t new, by any means, Saler said. He said Christian conspiracy theory has contained messages of blood libel, the idea that somehow the Jewish people are participating in horrible satanic rituals of children sacrifice, since the medieval period and was spread as a story by the Nazis prior to World War II as a justification for the Holocaust.
“That is drawing on a long-running strand of Christian conspiracy theory, but specifically that Jews are always involved in the kind of global cabal to influence the media and government institutions,” Saler said.
Another prominent lasting conspiracy theory is centered around COVID-19 and the COVID-19 vaccines.
“Strong Christian resistance to COVID-19 vaccines, specifically along the idea that somehow either the vaccines, or the entire pandemic, represents a kind of conspiracy designed by nefarious actors within the government to shut down churches, or that sort of thing,” he said.
Many Republican candidates also have bought in to the 2020 election fraud conspiracy and are running on that premise for their campaign or still investigating despite a lack of evidence.
Saler said it isn’t necessarily about political power or money to be made with these conspiracy theories, but more a matter of core belief. The conspiracy is something they want to believe in, like religion or spirituality, and they invest something of themselves into that belief. That belief is so strong that it can make them blind to glaring contradictions in their own conspiracy theory, which is known as cognitive dissonance.
“All of us psychologically are wired to where if we go all in on something, to where we are really going to lose something, if we turn out to have been proven wrong then that means being confronted with facts, dissenting facts, may actually cause us to double down,” Saler said.
It is known as the Backfire Effect.
Saler said all of us might believe something that isn’t provable or “a little wacky,” such as religious beliefs, but there is a point at which it crosses into harmful territory that there are steps that can be taken.
He said something positive needs to take the place of that piece of identity that would be lost.
“If this goes away, what is there for them on the other side?” he said.
Many traditional Republican seem to be echoing this by agreeing that there was some fraud in the 2020 election, or that maybe Jan. 6 was just a small group of rioters, to give them that softer landing while still walking the line of truth.
However, there is still the issue of how incorrect information and the conspiracy theories themselves spread.
Christian said conspiracy theories first started to spread when the printing press was invented in the 1440s by Johannes Gutenberg. The advent of Facebook, Twitter and other social media has given those conspiracy theories rocket boosters.
Christian said disinformation is information that has been purposefully created to deceive people. She said the spread of that disinformation becomes known as misinformation when it is spread by unwitting people who have bought into the conspiracy theories.
“A lot of us have probably shared misinformation because we thought it was funny or because it made us so mad, or like, ‘nobody could possibly believe this, I’m going to share it with my buddies,’” she said.
She said everyone should be conscious of what information they are sharing and think about the source.
She also said people should not rely on “automatic thinking.”
“If you’re running a race and you pass the person in second place, what place are you in? If you said ‘first place’ that is a sign of automatic thinking. You are in second place,” She said. “For a lot of folks that requires pausing and thinking that through, so that is an example of controlled thinking.”
She said this can be a way to vet information before it is shared on social media, and just because something is sent by someone you trust doesn’t mean it has been verified.
“We can’t always trust what we see,” Christian said.
That point itself seems to feed into the conspiratorial mindset, driving people deeper into the idea of not trusting any source of information. Christian said there are source checkers and fact checkers, like Snopes and PoliticFact, to help people sort through that information and verify what is real and what isn’t.
“Most free and democratic governments are working on disinformation toolkits and sources because it's so threatening to a healthy working democracy and the civil discourse and shared facts that are essential to governing ourselves well,” Christian said.
She also said diversifying where we get our news is good practice. A Pew Research Center poll in 2020 found that many people who watched Fox News or just subscribed to conservative outlets were more susceptible to conspiracy theories and disinformation.
Saler said having one-on-one conversations with people is key to helping people get beyond a conspiracy theory, but it needs to be done in a positive manner.
“It’s like, ‘Oh, no, you’re not a complete fool. There were reasons why you believed what you believed. It just happened to be based on the wrong assumptions, so here’s a dignified way to get out,” he said.
However, he said it is very hard to have a conversation with people who believe the other side is evil, or who just want to destroy the very fabric of democracy.
Christian said the conversations should be kept short and the facts repeated.
“You’re not going to undo someone’s belief in conspiracies overnight, but it’s important for those in relationships and who care about people who are believing in conspiracy theories to help them stay grounded in facts and evidence,” she said.
