What Trump, Ronan Farrow & “Plandemic” All Have in Common
We are a nation obsessed with conspiracy.
Introduction: Conspiracy Nation
In a trenchant critique of Ronan Farrow’s journalism, New York Times’ reporter Ben Smith recently asserted that Farrow “suggests conspiracies that are tantalizing but he cannot prove.” Smith is clear that Farrow isn’t a “fabulist” — “he’s not making things up” — and acknowledges that his work on Harvey Weinstein was critical to exposing decades of sexual abuse of women. But Smith was left wondering whether Farrow had sufficient evidence that executives at NBC had conspired with Weinstein to suppress Farrow’s work.
I’m not here to weigh in on the merits of Smith’s critique or offer any conclusion about Farrow’s allegations against NBC. Rather, I want to highlight Smith’s focus on conspiracy — an agreement to commit wrongdoing by two or more individuals — as a narrative technique. Smith claims that Farrow uses it for dramatic effect when the evidence might have told a less interesting or more complicated story. When challenged on his evidence, Farrow held tight to the word “conspiracy,” casting himself as the victim of powerful forces.
As a nation, we are awash in, and obsessed with, conspiracies and conspiracy theories. At the time that Smith’s article came down, we were already swimming in a pool of conspiratorial soup around the coronavirus. The “Plandemic” video followed a brief dalliance with blaming 5G for the coronavirus, all the while President Trump had been pushing a discredited theory that the coronavirus came from a Chinese lab.
It would easy to see this proliferation as a product of our time, as Smith does: “We are living in an era of conspiracies and dangerous untruths — many pushed by President Trump, but others hyped by his enemies — that have lured ordinary Americans into passionately believing wild and unfounded theories and fiercely rejecting evidence to the contrary.”
Obviously Trump has embraced conspiracy theories like “the deep state” to gaslight the public, but conspiratorial thinking was not born in the era of Trump. Nevertheless, given his embrace of it as a political weapon and the number of conspiracy theory headlines, it is easy to see why Jeffrey Goldberg recently argued in The Atlantic that the “conspiracy theorists are winning.”
What the Smith-Farrow exchange, Trump, and the “Plandemic” and other corona-inspired éxposés all have in common is that they are a symptom of our society’s deep struggle with truth, corruption, and feelings of powerlessness. Conspiracy provides us with an alluring narrative framework to make sense of our complex and chaotic world. Resisting that allure should be our goal. We all need to learn to check our love affair with conspiracy because it distorts our capacity to make sense of our reality.
The Seductive Appeal of Conspiracy
Our fascination with conspiracy stems from our desire to see the world through a simple lens of good and bad.
Conspiracy Provides Epistemological Clarity
By its nature, conspiracy is murky and mysterious. It is based on secret agreements, puppetry and pulling strings, acting behind the scenes, and hiding behind smoke and mirrors. Conspiracies incite a profound discomfort with being threatened and victimized by an enemy we can’t see.
Uncovering a conspiracy gives us certainty in the face of the unknown. Conspiracy does this by taking chaos and repackaging it with order and simplicity. It creates a picture out of a thousand puzzle pieces. It gives random and disparate acts of venality the illusion of coherence. As Joe Forrest writes in a very powerful piece on conspiracy thinking among Christians, “In a weird way, the idea of a secret cabal of powerful men and women pulling the strings on international events (like assassinations, pandemics, terrorist attacks, world wars, etc.) is somewhat comforting because at least it implies someone is in control of all this madness.”
Conspiracy Provides Moral Clarity and Superiority
Conspiracy draws on our desire for exposing injustices to the antiseptic light of the truth. Exposing a conspiracy also has the benefit of clearly defining who is good and who is bad. We now know who to blame — and we can direct our anger rather than spinning our wheels in fear of unseen threats. And it allows you to feel like you’re a part of an elite group of people with secret knowledge, or access to the truth, even as the forces of evil do all they can to silence you (which is also, it bears mentioning, the basic plotline of one of the most popular movie franchises of all time, Star Wars). As Forrest puts it: “The masses have been fooled by the media and/or government, but I’m special and different, and I know the truth!”
The seductive appeal of conspiracy also helps to explain the popularity of Julio Vincent Gambuto’s viral article suggesting a conspiracy between the government and big business to gaslight us into returning to life as it was before the pandemic: “[I]t will be a one-two punch from both big business and the big White House — inextricably intertwined now more than ever and being led by, as our luck would have it, a Marketer in Chief. Business and government are about to band together to knock us unconscious again.”
In short, conspiracy simplifies a complex reality and gives you the juicy, exhilarating storyline in which you are the force for good that exposes the bad actor.
Conspiracy Theories or Conspiratorial Thinking?
Before going any further, a few definitions are in order. A “conspiracy theory” is a theory or belief that a conspiracy exists but it remains unproven because there is either no or only limited evidence to support it. As Jules Evans points out, though, the term “conspiracy theory” is now fraught because “it can be a way of simply dismissing a topic without considering it.”
For that reason, “conspiratorial thinking” is more apt to describe the mindset that goes in search of conspiracies: It uses conspiracy as a framework for organizing information into a particular narrative, and therefore is often prone to generating “conspiracy theories” (and, occasionally, to finding actual conspiracies).
Who falls prey to conspiratorial thinking? We all do, to one degree or another. And it’s not inherently bad. After all, prosecutors have to adopt conspiratorial thinking that links together disparate actors and acts to form a theory about whether there is a criminal conspiracy afoot. The same is true of journalists, whom we depend on to uncover corruption of this sort. We all want to make sense of our world, and the mind likes to simplify complex matters and keep us safe from threat.
Nevertheless, there’s a tendency to isolate particular groups and attribute to them a penchant for conspiracy. Recent articles have emphasized conspiracy theory tendencies among the far right, Christians, New Age spiritual seekers, and those who embrace holistic and alternative medicine. The common thread, according to these authors, is that these people all share a profound distrust of mainstream institutions and authority, which have often been hostile to those groups.
Conspiratorial thinking isn’t limited to those groups. Rather, anybody who feels like a victim or lacking in power against bigger forces may adopt conspiratory thinking. We use conspiracy to frame the story when we feel attacked by those in power, because it provides a clear-cut picture of who is right and wrong. Those who engage in conspiratorial thinking acquire a sense of empowerment from the knowledge and exposure of a conspiracy, whose power resided in its secret attacks on the victim.
The Dangers of Conspiratorial Thinking
Conspiratorial thinking, however, often leads to the dangerous pitfalls because it warps and alters how we process information and evaluate it as evidence.
Once You See a Conspiracy, You Can’t Unsee It
We might start with some piece of alarming information. It suggests something more sinister, behind the scenes. We start to suspect a conspiracy. We reach a tipping point when we believe that the conspiracy is more likely than not. But was this based on evidence or a prior belief that the parties involved are “bad” or have improper motives? Does the evidence have any corroboration?
A recent example can be found in Smith’s dissection of Farrow’s story about certain of Michael Cohen’s documents at the Treasury Department. Farrow’s story postulated, to dramatic effect, that the documents had suspiciously “vanished.” According to Smith, Farrow’s reliance on conspiracy as a narrative, with its more exciting storyline, led him to downplay the possibility that the documents had been placed on a “restricted” setting and to not go in search of corroboration of his more exciting conspiratorial story.
Because conspiracy hides in the shadows, the desire to unearth a conspiracy means we start looking for one. The desire to see if a conspiracy exists is often what creates the perception that one exists. The desire to find one can always patch one together, taking disparate pieces of information to find a pattern. This also helps to explain the persistence of certain conspiracy theories that seemingly won’t go away.
Contrary Evidence is Disregarded
Once you’ve decided that there’s a possibility or a probability that a conspiracy exists, then all evidence gets viewed from that framework. It makes it hard for contrary evidence to reframe what you’ve already started to see. As Whitney Phillips explains, “Facts are ineffective at dislodging false beliefs,” and she points to psychological studies that show that people operate based on a “coherency check,” meaning that they tend to accept as true that which aligns with what you already believe. So if you also believe a conspiracy exists, you’ll tend to believe any information that supports it, and disregard contrary evidence.
This is what has happened with a lot of the conspiracies around the coronavirus, particularly the “Plandemic” video, which have been immune to debunking by those already committed to believing them. That same dynamic is what Glenn Greenwald argues led “resistance journalists” to reject contrary evidence: “It has been well-documented that MSNBC and CNN spent three years peddling all sorts of ultimately discredited Russiagate conspiracy theories by excluding from their airwaves anyone who dissented from or even questioned those conspiracies.”
It also sheds light on how some of the more convoluted or widespread conspiracy theories fail common sense. As Forrest mentions, so many purported conspiracies involve intricate planning among actors, like government officials, who are also routinely accused of being incompetent. That they would be able to accomplish their nefarious goals without mistakes, leaks, other mishaps plainly runs counter to their competencies, yet somehow people overlook this and still suspect a widespread conspiracy.
Suppression of Information Becomes Proof of a Conspiracy
Once you’re persuaded of a conspiracy and now view all evidence through that lens, conspiratorial thinking sees the suppression of information as evidence of its truth. This kind of response is part of what fueled the spread of “Plandemic,” as different links were taken down, and those who very much wanted to see it, or felt this was a sign of censorship, rushed to spread the link as part of the effort to bring down the conspirators.
Because conspiracy depends on hiding the truth, hiding any information becomes a feedback loop that confers legitimacy on what was hidden. “After all,” the conspiratorial mindset asks, “why else would you hide it?” The claim by the powers that take it down is that the information is not true is offset by the claim to conspiracy; debunked information that claims to document a conspiracy that is somehow suppressed is itself evidence of the conspiracy.
As Jon Allsop writes, “By debunking theories, we risk reinforcing their appeal, and furthering their spread.” “Throw a fact check at a subversion myth, and it will transform into proof for believers,” confirms Whitney Phillips. “After all, trying to disprove the existence of a Satanic plot is exactly what a Satanist would do.”
Naturally, there’s some logic to this. Conspiracies try to undermine proof of their existence by discrediting and suppressing evidence. They distort the truth — there’s nothing to see here, keep moving. Or, as we saw with the allegations of a conspiracy among Trump and the State Department to demand a quid pro quo from Ukraine, “The call was perfect.”
But that places us back in a chicken-egg conundrum: If I believe there’s a conspiracy, telling me that the evidence doesn’t add up can feel like gaslighting rather than an alternative interpretation of the evidence. That is, I see your efforts to shape the evidence not as objective reasoning, but as an effort to distort my perception to avoid the truth, and thus becomes further evidence of the conspiracy. I’m in an epistemological quagmire: How do I tell the difference between debunking and gaslighting?
Conspiracies Beget More Conspiracies
Because conspiratorial thinking is now the framework for making sense of reality, it proliferates with seeing ever more or ever-widening conspiracies.
Identifying the conspiracy isn’t enough. Because it is organized and shadowy, we aren’t ever satisfied that we’ve identified all of the conspiracy’s tendrils, roots and offshoots. The web could be even deeper, the threat even greater. We don’t know what we don’t know, and that’s a scary threat, so we have to keep looking. This is why the coronavirus conspiracy theories have proliferated — a global pandemic inspires global-sized theories — and, as David Rohde avers, is also characteristic of Trump’s passionate embrace of his conspiracy theories about the “deep state”: the conspiracy expands from one government agency to another to provide Trump cover from criticism.
Next, conspiracies start to proliferate. As Forrest puts it, “Every conspiracy theory is a gateway drug to an even more ludicrous and far-reaching conspiracy theory.” That’s why the coronavirus conspiracies have proliferated in the face of YouTube and Facebook taking down the videos, or why Trump traffics so readily in this. Once you start to see conspiracy somewhere, you start to see it everywhere.
Conspiratorial Thinking Can Distract from Real Conspiracies
When we get mired in conspiratorial thinking, we undermine our capacity to root out real conspiracies. True conspiracies are undeniably pernicious, and they cause enormous damage. “Plots, scandals, collusions, and cover-ups do occur in business and politics — just rarely on the scale as imagined by conspiracy theorists,” Forrest writes. We don’t want to throw out all conspiracy with the conspiracy theory bathwater.
Our capacity to discern true conspiracies from conspiracy theories is undermined when conspirators, to avoid detection or accountability, point to something else as the “real” conspiracy — a “counter-conspiracy” whose purpose is to distract the public.
You can see this in how Trump and the GOP responded to the Ukraine quid pro quo by trotting out the old Ukraine-DNC server conspiracy theory. All of this was used to distract from the numerous witnesses who testified under penalty of perjury that there was a conspiracy to leverage critical aid that Congress had already approved in exchange for dirt on a political rival. It also explains why Trump weaponizes conspiracy to undermine his political enemies, as he has done most recently with Joe Scarborough, to avoid accountability.
It’s also what’s happening with the GOP and Federalist Society are doing to the federal judiciary right now. As the authors of this piece in Slate write: Mitch McConnell and the Federalist Society are working together to install federal judges and using conspiracy theories around voter fraud as their cover. The real conspiracy isn’t voter fraud. The real conspiracy is that monied interests are attempting to influence politicians to install judges who will vote in a particular way, thus undermining judicial independence.
Shifting Away from Conspiratorial Thinking
We are facing a moment when the public has to raise its standards for evaluating information, and to recognize that we all can fall prey to conspiratorial thinking.
In that regard, even though some have regarded Smith’s critique of Farrow as a scathing takedown born of jealousy, it performed a valuable service by asking the kinds of questions that journalists don’t often ask openly and transparently, particularly when it comes to the seductive allure of conspiracy. The fact that some people responded that Smith’s true motive was to preempt some future story by Farrow and protect those in power from accountability — without any evidence to support that view — shows just how deep conspiratorial thinking goes.
How do we retrain our minds not to fall prey to conspiratorial thinking? I can think of at least 3 main steps.
Study the Psychology of Conspiratorial Thinking
Part of this process also means we have to face our suspicious mindset and distrust of the media. Trump’s assault on the media and the massive amount of disinformation on social media has warped our ability to digest the news.
Start by reading about conspiracy theories and conspiratorial thinking. The Atlantic has devoted a series called “Shadowland” to the topic. Forrest’s article provides several good suggestions for tackling your relationship to the media, with a helpful addendum of articles. Or dive into this helpful guide on conspiracy theory by Stephan Lewandowsky and John Cook. Learn what the tendencies are, and notice which ones you share.
We also have to accept that we are often not experts in the subjects that form the basis of a conspiracy theory. As the authors of “A Lot of People Are Saying” state, conspiracy theory can often signal a rejection of the credibility that comes with expertise, which can be seen as “elitist.” It’s possible to defer to someone else’s expertise without relinquishing your capacity to ask questions. That means, as Evans reminds us, we have to be willing to accept emotionally that our beliefs may not be true.
Additionally, as the Smith-Farrow skirmish suggests, the media is going to have rebuild trust with the kind of work that Smith did and Forrest espouses — vetting journalists’ work more carefully and returning to more boring stories that are more complex and transparent about sources, corroboration, and what we don’t know. It’s less compelling, and that’s hard to accept at a moment when our oversaturated minds seem to demand the cinematic bombast of a summer blockbuster, but that’s what we, the public, need from our news. Give us conspiracies when the evidence is there, but don’t give us conspiracy to make the news more compelling.
Learn to Analyze Evidence
We, the readers of America, need to bring a critical eye to what we read and look at issues of source, credibility, and corroboration. Who is saying it? What evidence do they provide? What are their possible motives for saying it? Who else is saying it, and do they corroborate or undermine or have nothing to do with what the first person is saying? Objectively, do the facts tell you that there is no conspiracy or that what you thought was the conspiracy was actually a conspiracy of a different sort?
The key is to keep “conspiratorial thinking” in check — to be able to see connections and draw a possible picture of a conspiracy but resist its exciting allure. As we have seen, when you frame the search for truth as conspiracy, it can alter how you interpret facts. As Beth Daley rightly summarizes: “For those interested in actual conspiracies — including investigative journalists, historians, prosecutors or judges — the existence of a plot is a testable hypothesis. The approach to evidence demands that sources are checked and claims verified. If there is an absence of proof or if evidence contradicts the hypothesis, this is not automatically considered to be part of a cover-up.”
Perhaps the biggest step you can take is to learn to distinguish interest convergence from conspiracy. Conspiracy thinking exaggerates — it stretches information, it claims something is deeper, more widespread, more nefarious and evil than the evidence can support. It takes pieces that overlap and creates a pattern that may not be supported. It turns association into alliance and agreement. So a key to that you’re falling prey to conspiratorial thinking is when you see a bunch of people or companies whose interests converge and overlap and automatically assume that means they have an agreement. This is the line between “interest convergence” and “conspiracy.”
This is essentially what was concluded in the Russian matter: Trump wanted to win, Russia wanted Trump to win, and there were overtures and meetings, but no evidence that an agreement was ever reached. The line may be very close, or very hard to make out, but that line between conspiracy and interest convergence exists. Our focus on conspiracy obscured the fact that this was still atrocious behavior from a Presidential candidate.
Take this example: A YouTube video documented how eerily and sadly so many corporate ads were using the same language, same basic script, and similar language for their Covid-19 commercials. Convergence would suggest that they all shared a similar goal — to create an emotional response in the viewer that instilled positive feelings toward the company that would foster future transactions or purchases. This is, of course, the goal of all marketing and advertising.
A conspiratorial thinker would take the next leap and say, This similarity means that big business is conspiring against us. Did these companies all jump on a Zoom call and agree to manipulate the public with a single template for their ads? Or did their shared interest all drive them to use the same basic marketing techniques that have long been deployed by companies to create an emotional reaction in viewers? (After all, there’s a whole industry devoted to the neuroscience of persuasion and selling.)
Examine Your Feelings of Powerlessness
And that brings us back to Smith and Farrow. Much of that dustup turned on the meaning of “conspiracy.” In response to Smith’s piece, Ashley Feinberg writes: “It seems fairly clear here that Farrow is talking about how [Hillary] Clinton’s close relationship with Weinstein caused her to see his reporting as a threat to her, personally, and that he was troubled that she, like many powerful individuals, seemed more concerned with her own reputation than with finding justice for Weinstein’s victims. That is a far, far cry from implying that she was somehow involved in a conspiracy to kill his story with Weinstein himself.” In other words, as Feinberg portrays it, interest convergence, not conspiracy, is what accurately explains Clinton’s behavior.
But Farrow himself can’t seem to let up on the power of the word “conspiracy,” and he recasts his claims as the accumulation of power to suppress him. As Smith writes: “On Sunday night, Mr. Farrow offered another defense of the word ‘conspiracy’ in his book’s subtitle, saying it ‘accurately conveys the substance of the book and efforts by powerful men to evade accountability.’ He added, ‘With respect to Weinstein, I carefully lay out the various levers of pressure exerted against my reporting — through personal relationships, private espionage, legal threats, etc.”
The reason that Farrow appeals to conspiracy in this instance, at least as Smith interprets him, is that Farrow needs to be the victim of malevolent forces whose motive was personal, not because of any mistake or shortcoming on Farrow’s part. “Two other NBC journalists, neither of whom would speak for the record, expressed a different view, which is shared by network executives: That Mr. Farrow was a talented young reporter with big ambitions but little experience, who didn’t realize how high the standards of proof were, particularly at slow-moving, super-cautious news networks. A normal clash between a young reporter and experienced editors turned toxic.”
Smith bristles at the idea that Farrow uses the word “conspiracy” to reflect “his subjective experience.” It may be a sound criticism for a journalist, who is likely to be misunderstood by using “conspiracy” as a metaphor rather than a legal allegation. But we should also recognize that those are the same subjective feelings that give rise to the public’s desire to point our fingers and blame some powerful group of evildoers for our powerlessness. I don’t blame Farrow or any other person or group that feels victimized for resorting to conspiracy as an explanation. The truth is that sometimes people do harm us, suppress us, and work against our interests because they’re protecting their interests. But that doesn’t always or necessarily add up to a conspiracy.
Ultimately, conspiratorial thinking is a product of dealing with fear, powerlessness, and complexity. The world can be messy and scary — all the more so in light of the current administration’s ineptitude. Conspiracy as a narrative framework helps us to make sense of it. So as much as we can train ourselves to look for answers, evaluate evidence, seek our corroboration, turn to experts, and ask questions with an open mind, we collectively need to look inside at our own sense of powerlessness.
The next time you start to see a conspiracy theory and go in search of confirmation, ask yourself: Where am I afraid? Where do I feel powerless? What does being right about this purported conspiracy do for me emotionally? Does it make me feel like I belong to a special elite group of people who have unique access to the truth? Once you ask those questions, you may start to see the information you read quite differently.