THEY SAY BELIEVE HALF OF WHAT YOU SEE, SON, AND NONE OF WHAT YOU HEAR

“The American mind simply has not come to a realization of the evil which has been introduced into our midst.”  That sounds like something that Donald Trump could have said at one of his rallies last week, but it comes from an article published in 1956 by J. Edgar Hoover, FBI Director for life.    

Back in the 50s, when Hoover wrote about evil in our midst, it was socially acceptable to believe in a Russian/communist conspiracy to infiltrate and undermine key institutions in American society.  There was a kernel of truth in the claim, but Hoover wildly exaggerated the capacity of Boris-and-Natasha style agitprop to influence American public opinion.  Russia posed a legitimate external threat, but it didn’t become an internal threat until it stopped trying to sell us communism. 

When the Soviet Union broke up, and Russia no longer felt obligated to promote its ideology, they began to think more clearly about how to sabotage their chief geopolitical rival.  Sabotage was much easier than conversion, and as the events of 2016 proved, it wasn’t difficult to introduce confusion and discord into the American political system.      

We were sitting ducks for Russia in part because of that pesky karma thing.  The good old USA had been intervening in the affairs of other countries for decades, as if we were immune from the principle that what goes around comes around.  But it’s also true that important public and private institutions in America did a lot to undermine their own credibility in the years after World War II.

This country has been awash in conspiracies – not just conspiracy theories, but genuine conspiracies – for all of my adult life.  By “conspiracy,” I mean deliberate attempts to deceive the public, either by telling outright lies about, or by withholding important information on, matters critical to the public interest. 

If that assertion seems cryptic or even paranoid, let me offer some examples.  The federal government covered up embarrassing details related to the Kennedy assassination.  It lied to us about the Vietnam War, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and the Iraq War.  In the private sector, corruption has been pervasive in most of our major financial sectors in recent decades (e.g. Enron, WorldCom, Lehman Brothers); in our college and professional sports; and even in our churches (e.g the pedophilia scandal that continues to plague Catholicism). 

If you’re not cynical, it’s because you haven’t been paying attention.  All Russia had to do was exploit divisions that were already present.  Social media gave them the perfect tool for the job, and used it just well enough.

And in doing so, they’ve made all those earlier conspiracies seem quaint and old fashioned.  Since 2016, we’ve been living in Donald Trump’s world, where truth is infinitely elastic, and all bad news is fake news.  Trump himself made that explicit last week at one of his endless series of rallies.  He declared “What you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening."

Trump benefits from a massive media infrastructure devoted to ignoring bad news, or spinning it into good news.  But even an obvious propaganda outlet like Fox is basically limited to putting a pro-Trump spin on the same stories that CNN and MSNBC cover.  They are still tethered, however tenuously, to reality.  That’s not good enough for a lot of Deplorables.

Enter QAnon, the new king of pro-Trump conspiracy theorists.  QAnon writes fan fiction for the MAGA set.  In his tall tales, Donald Trump is a knight in shining armor who has secretly broken up pedophile rings, saving thousands of children.  His criticism of Robert Mueller is just a smokescreen.  Trump and Mueller are actually working together to bring down Hillary Clinton, who’s going to jail soon.  Trump is just biding his time, waiting to spring the trap that will destroy the Deep State once and for all.  So much winning you’re going to get tired of winning!

The QAnon phenomenon unintentionally demonstrates the insecurity of Trump fanatics.  They claim to believe that Trump is a genius, playing eight-dimensional chess, outfoxing his enemies at every turn.  But underneath the bluster, they’re just scared.  They’re unconsciously re-enacting the postwar Red Scare, when people like J. Edgar Hoover saw Russians lurking in every shadow.   Which is ironic, because nowadays Russians are indeed everywhere.  But they don’t have to lurk in shadows anymore.  Russians have been hobnobbing with Trump and his people quite openly.  Of course, QAnon’s fans get defensive when you point that out.

In 2015, science fiction writer William Gibson wrote: “People find conspiracy theories fantastically comforting not because they’re more frightening than reality, but because they’re less frightening than reality.” 

There’s a lot of truth in Gibson’s observation.  Since election night 2016, my own reality (politically speaking) has been pretty frightening.  I was an early adopter of the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory, at least in part because I wanted it to be true.  Luckily, give or take a pee tape or two, nearly every seemingly implausible rumor connecting Trump and Putin has turned out to be valid.  And I haven’t given up on the pee tape just yet, although we don’t need it to prove Trump’s unfitness for office.

On the anti-Trump side of the internet, there’s a guy known on Twitter as CounterChekist.  He uses his own cryptic terminology to announce the existence of sealed indictments against members of the Trump Crime Family.  He says, for instance, that Mueller has obtained eight grand jury indictments that the public has yet to learn about.  Big deal, you might say – a left wing fantasy is still a fantasy.  Anyone could make up a number like that.

But unlike QAnon, whose gathering storm is always coming real soon now, CounterCheckist has correctly called a lot of Mueller’s indictments.  For what it’s worth, he says that there’s an indictment for Ivana waiting to be unsealed. 

Conventional wisdom scoffs at all conspiracy theories, but that’s just as wrongheaded as embracing every conspiracy theory.  Still, healthy skepticism is a good habit to cultivate.  On this, if nothing else, Ronald Reagan had the right idea – trust but verify. 

My advice – to myself and to my readers – is to be patient.  We’ll find out soon enough whether QAnon and CounterChekist have inside information or are just blowing smoke.  While we’re waiting, I’ll leave you with a quotation from George Orwell’s 1984:

“I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.”