Does QAnon Mean We’re Having Another Orson Welles Moment?
Eighty-one years ago, at 8 p.m. on October 30, 1938, in honor of Halloween, a 23-year-old Orson Wells and his colleagues at CBS studios in New York City pranked a nation of gullible Americans, convincing them that Martians had landed in the fictional town of Grover’s Mill, New Jersey.
The radio play, a version of H.G. Wells’ story, persuaded people into believing that Martians were marching toward Manhattan, releasing poison gas along the way. Panic was widespread. People ran out of their homes with their faces wrapped in wet towels. Folks ushered their families into cars and drove like bats out of hell trying to escape. Phone lines to the CBS switchboard and police stations across the nation were jammed.
Critical thinking played a role in determining those who were gullible and those that were not. Those who simply fact-checked by going to external sources, like changing the channel and not hearing news about a Martian landing, quickly understood that the story was fictitious. After all, this was broadcast during the regular time slot for the weekly Orson Welles program. Those not likely to fact-check were more likely to panic, and a 1940 study further suggested that this gullible group was insecure, emotionally and intellectually immature, and psychologically at least, highly suggestible. Religiosity was also a factor, as those who would correspond to today’s far-right Christian conservative thought the Martian landing was the apocalypse.
The gullible American impacted by “War of the Worlds” eighty-one years ago remains with us today. They believe Obamacare would send their elderly to “death panels”, believe that global warming is a hoax, believe that the massacre at Sandy Hook never happened, believe that Democrats eat children and run pedophile rings, believe COVID-19 to be nothing more than a bad case of the flu or a mere plot by the Democrats, believe that Joe Biden is really Donald Trump in disguise, or believe that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election despite all legal evidence to the contrary.
It is the gullible American that stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, then anguished like small children when caught and placed in handcuffs, claiming they were only doing what their political leaders demanded of them.
We watched in utter amazement while Ivy League-educated politicians used their intellectual acuity for sinister purposes; using the power of the racial hierarchy, pushing all the right emotional buttons, convincing the gullible that something was stolen from them, that something was taken and they had to get it back at all costs, even if it meant losing their lives. All the while, these same politicians hid in the shadows like cowards at the moment of rapture, only to emerge with more rhetoric for the gullible once the coast was clear.
The politically astute have always taken advantage of the gullible American and they will continue to do so. They remain unscathed while the gullible suffer; their toxic cesspool of lies no different than the poisonous gas sprayed from the Martian killing machines that landed in make-believe Grover’s Mill, New Jersey, on October 30, 1938.
© 2021 Andrew P. Brown III, PhD. All rights reserved.