Jun 15, 2024
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Why Trump and QAnon Are So Hard to Stop: Conspiracy Theories and LARPs
by Doniphan Blair
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Trump's speech on January 6th, 2020, will surely go down as one of the greatest public brainwashing performances in history, equal to Hitler at Nuremberg. illo: D. BlairWith all the recent revelations, from Trump's multipronged conspiracy and attempt to lead his armed militia's march on the capitol to the reemergence of Q on June 24th, this article, written for publication on January 6th, 2022, would be begging for an update if most of its basic facts didn't remain so pertinent.
PEOPLE WHO BLAME DONALD TRUMP'S
behavior on narcissism or authoritarianism often neglect to note his political career has been based entirely on conspiracy theories. Indeed, he endorsed birtherism, the allegation that Obama was born in Kenya, specifically to bolster his 2012 presidential run. It may seem like an odd plank for a political platform, but conspiracism had become popular on the left, after 9/11 and among the anti-vaxxers, and on the right, with prejudices and phobias dating back to the 1950s and beyond.
Moreover, Trump is the scion of a conspiracy theory dynasty. He was best friends with Roy Cohn, the notorious New York lawyer and fixer but also national player and righthand man of Senator Joseph McCarthy during his ‘50s witch hunt for communists and gays. McCarthy’s political career was also based entirely on conspiracy theories.
Whether or not there was a sexual relationship, Cohn knew McCarthy intimately. McCarthy’s big mistake was not destabilizing America during the darkest days of the Cold War, according to Cohn, nor being addicted to gambling, alcohol and morphine, but drinking his own Kool-Aid. Believing CTs is for followers, Cohn realized, while CT leaders must remain free to invent and adapt. They also have to avoid the self-destruction of believing their own lies.
It was love at first sight in 1973 when Cohn met the 27-year-old Trump, who was searching for a lawyer to beat a federal probe of his company’s racist practices. Along with hiring Cohn, Trump adopted his transactionalism and public tactics—attack first, counter attack twice as hard, never admit error or defeat, always blame someone, file endless law suits, delay or deny payments, don’t pay taxes, donate to politicians, and manipulate the media—but also his secret hand: conspiracy theories.
According to McCarthy’s latest biographer, the deep-digging Larry Tye, in “Demagogue” (2020), “The aging Cohn taught the fledgling Trump the transcendent lessons he had learned from his master, McCarthy—how to smear opponents and contrive grand conspiracies.”
After becoming birtherism’s celebrity spokesperson, Trump went on to develop “grand” conspiracy theories about Mexicans and Muslims, but he came to specialize in voter fraud. Conspiracy theories about election theft are comparatively easy to initiate since the vote counting appears hidden in back rooms or on hard drives. Indeed, immediately after the 2012 election, Trump tweeted that Barack Obama "lost the popular vote by a lot," even though he won by five million votes, and that the Democrats stole the election from Mitt Romney. At the 2016 Iowa caucus, he denounced Republican Senator Ted Cruz for ballot stuffing and, a few months later, insisted the Democrats would steal the general election if he won.
On Election Day 2016, Trump supporters scrutinized polling places and trumped-up minor irregularities, which was promoted as “Stop the Steal” by Republican trickster Roger Stone, Trump’s campaign manager but also an old friend and fellow disciple of Roy Cohn. Trump won, mooting that point, but still availed himself of the opportunity to accuse the Democrats of stealing the popular vote, simply because such claims abide a cardinal rule of conspiracy theories: reinforce them relentlessly.
Although his allies and opponents alike attributed his narcissism or fear of losing, four years later, he campaigned on the conspiracy-based proposition that Democrats would cheat again, and he claimed a “landslide” victory on Election Night. He then proceeded to mount one of the greatest false narrative indoctrination campaigns in history, despite having failed to show a shred of evidence for election fraud in scores of court appearances.
Trump debuted his CT team on November 19th, 2020, at the Republican Party headquarters, a foreboding sign for that venerable institution. In addition to his blundering but equally conspiratorial lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, it featured the fast-talking Sidney Powell and her elaborate stories about votes being changed by Venezuela, China and voting machine companies. Powell’s CTs came directly from influencers in QAnon, the dark-fantasy conspiracy cult, which had hit the news six months earlier and shocked many Americans with its strangeness and number of adherents.
Trump unveiled his own “in depth” conspiracy analysis on December 2nd. Although his speech was so lie-laden not even Fox News carried it, its repetitive, declarative sentences were a master class in public brainwashing. Trump’s CT was based simply on voting law changes and mail-in ballot fraud, but he allowed Powell to introduce elaborate international intrigues two weeks earlier to provide his fans a full-service CT emporium replete with the fantastic stories CTers love to entertain.
When Trump didn’t concede, many Republicans and most Americans were stunned, and they found his theories ludicrous. Alas, he had been working on CTs for years; he knew his audience intimately; and he persisted monomaniacally. Assisted by Republican politicians and lawyers but also dirty tricksters and CT professionals, from his old friend Roger Stone to America’s premier conspiracy monger, Alex Jones, who started the popular show “Infowars” and pioneered the theory 9/11 was an inside job, he easily convinced naïve Trumpers, radical rightwingers and mystical QAnons. Indeed, many of all three cohorts were overjoyed when he announced the Stop the Steal movement was back, and he was holding a rally for it in Washington D.C. on January 6th.
The Insurrection became America’s biggest political crisis since the Civil War and the largest crime scene outside of 9/11 but also proof of Trump’s CT powers. It fulfilled many of his predictions and provided a dramatic performance piece around which to build a “saving democracy” fantasy. As crazy as it was—and Republican leaders and Fox commentators were frantically begging Trump to call it off, to save their very lives or legacy not to mention their sanity—later that night, eight senators, led by Ted Cruz, and 139 representatives endorsed Trump’s Big Lie by refusing to certify the Electoral College vote.
Republicans unfamiliar with conspiracy theories and Trump’s ability to manage them were understandably nervous. Nevertheless, despite a year of investigations and exposes about January 6th, from the strongarming of Vice President Mike Pence and the adoption of the fake electors strategy to the many judgements or cases pending against him, Trump is still able to rationalize to partisans his behavior, using euphemism, misdirection, lies, threats and, of course, conspiracy theories.
The big problem facing Trump, Trumpers and their facilitators, as well as those of us attempting to understand and oppose them, is: Once people allow themselves to believe one unsupported conspiracy theory, it is almost impossible to unbelieve, and they generally adopt others, since CTs operate almost entirely in the imagination.
Actual conspiracies, in distinction to the made-up variant, are common among criminals and spies, and not uncommon with politicians, business people, religious leaders and lovers. At any given time, therefore, some people are scheming and others are watching and wondering what they are up to—conspiracy theorizing, in other words.
For the professional conspiracy theorist, however, finding actual conspiracies is secondary to influencing public opinion and accruing power. Moreover, the conspiracy they are actually interested in is the one they are perpetrating themselves, using the conspiracy theory itself. As CT professionals, they finetune it to their followers’ psychology, introducing child abuse accusations, for example, to trigger abuse survivors.
Of course, “conspiracy theory” is also a standard slur against any unproven hypotheses. In addition, fanciful notions are central to religion and art, and they figure in science, business and romance. But when esoteric ideas pertain to religion or love, they must be more spiritual than materialist to operate, and those involving art or business are generally recognized as fiction or speculation.
In politics, however, CTs masquerade as fact.
Trump is not stupid or crazy, despite all appearances. Hardly “a very stable genius,” as he once bragged, he does have emotional intelligence, cracked charisma, and mad publicity and law-skirting skills. In fact, he often outflanks rivals or enemies, particularly those who see him as an idiot, instead of idiot savant, or who fail to imagine the depths to which he can descend.
Largely on that account, Trump acquired a football team, three casinos and an airline, in rapid succession in the ‘80s, even as he bankrupted them with aggressive business strategies, mismanagement and profit skimming. He stayed one step ahead of catastrophe by hustling tax abatements and high-interest loans, by threatening to sue, and by spinning sales pitches and stories, like the notion he was a “disruptor,” who was actually improving a given business, or that his failures were actually successes.
Hence, it can be said that Trump’s middle-to-late business career was also based entirely on conspiracy theories. “It is literally all a fraud, his life,” summarized the hard-working investigative journalist David Cay Johnston, author of three revealing books on Trump, in a 2016 interview.
Once a CT leader convinces followers of their authenticity, facts become fungible, and they can say the opposite of what media or authorities report, what can be called “conspiracy mirroring.” Claiming innocence and that one’s opponent is a criminal monster may seem like a schoolyard tactic, but it is psychologically astute and can give an established narrative a new interpretation simply by flipping a few facts. Conspiracy mirroring is central to conspiracism, in fact, as George Orwell pointed out in “1984,” with his fascist state’s slogan, “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
Trump learned to manipulate media from Roy Cohn, who started feeding leads to gossip columnists as a teen and had three high school friends become media moguls. Trump used Cohn’s media connections but also roleplaying aliases to plant stories about himself and threats of law suits to repress reports portraying him poorly. He especially opposed those impugning his inflated worth, which he deflates in turn for taxes. During the 2016 presidential campaign, the tabloid National Enquirer, owned for decades by Cohn’s childhood chum, Generoso Pope, buried over 50 damaging stories, including a Playboy model’s detailed allegation Trump raped her.
“Bad publicity is sometimes better than no publicity,” Trump explained in his “The Art of the Deal”, which became a bestseller for the mega-publisher Random House but was entirely ghostwritten. “Controversy, in short, sells.” Even the liberal press profits by covering Trump’s transgressions to excess, which provides their audience a popular schadenfreude but gives him free advertising.
Using his spectacle-making superpowers, Trump shifted from struggling real estate mogul to selling lifestyles, at first by licensing his pseudo-opulent brand to other developers. Then he ran beauty pageants, starred in a middling-popular reality television show, “The Apprentice”, and became a politician, starting with running for president, naturally, given his ego and ability to sell worldviews but also apprenticeship to Cohn.
Re-registering as a Republican, Trump tossed his hat into the ring a second time in 2011. Unlike during his brief 2000 campaign, as a pro-choice candidate with the Reform Party, he had a powerful trifecta of support mechanisms: the popularity of his show, the disciplinarian character he roleplayed on it, and the birtherism conspiracy theory. Although he soon realized Romney was a notably moral and capable Republican, and dropped out and endorsed him, he continued to explore his presidential ambitions through birtherism.
While modern life is based on science and facts, conspiracy theorists exploited a growing desire to oppose global, governmental or intellectual authorities and to embrace alternative views and fantasies. These interests started on the left, with the individualism, rebellion and truth questioning of the ‘60s, but were eventually adopted by the right and amplified by the digital age’s flood of information, social media algorithms, fake news and secretive side. The very year the internet blew up, 1995, so did rightwing conspiracism, with the white nationalist bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building, Newt Gingrich’s scorched earth takeover of Congress, Rush Limbaugh’s conspiracy theories about President Clinton, and the growth of evangelical millenarianism in the final days of the millennia.
Trump is not unique. Many of today’s political and cultural leaders are accomplished CT developers or manipulators, from Vladimir Putin to Fox commentators Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, or public conspiracy theorists, like Alex Jones and Q, the anonymous oracle behind QAnon.
Q’s bio has yet to be conclusively established, but there is strong evidence “he” is not a government insider with “Q-level clearance,” and there were a number of Qs, who usurped the group from each other. In point of fact, QAnon is not an actual cult or political movement but a “live action role playing game,” sometimes called an “alternative reality game.” A form of large group play, often based on scavenger hunts or costume play, LARPs were invented in 1996 by corporate creatives for use in advertising.
Q’s LARPing has been known since 2018 but has only been documented in full by one major news outlet, The Financial Times of London, in its 15-minute, October 15th, 2020, video, “Is QAnon a Game Gone Wrong?” That video has only been viewed on YouTube 80,000 times, as of this writing, which suggests that most people doubt something as earthshaking as QAnon could come from a LARP, run by a twenty-something on their phone. Nevertheless, journalists at The Washington Post and NBC News and researchers at Wikileaks and Cult Research Institute of New Jersey, who have investigated QAnon, have often used terms like “game-like” or “possible LARP.”
The most famous corporate LARP was “I Love Bees,” which promoted “Halo 2,” Microsoft’s megahit video game, in 2004. By that time, many gamers, hipsters and Burning Man attendees had started their own LARPs, some of which became popular or cult-like. By the time video games were grossing more than Hollywood films in 2010, gaming was dominating aspects of American culture. Meanwhile, the rest of us acquiesced to the internet’s intrinsic roleplaying and espionage, from inventing online aliases or dating profiles to making anonymous comments, snooping on each other, or fighting fraudsters.
Also around 2010, LARPs crossed into politics on 4chan, a bare-bones soc-med platform devoted to free speech and anonymity. Notorious for its porn and neo-Nazis as well as conspiracy theorists, 4chan also provided an internet commons for more normative rebels including Anonymous, the white-hat hacker association which started there.
In keeping with that nomenclature, people roleplaying intelligence agents turned leakers used aliases like FBIAnon and CIAAnon. Incorporating LARPing’s scavenger hunt and puzzle traditions, they encouraged followers to do their own research, decipher their cryptic posts, and uncover evermore conspiracies.
Indeed, CT proselytizing is itself a LARP. If you act the part of an enthusiastic conspiracy theorist, even though no one knows what you really believe, you can attract followers and attack opponents. LARPing increases audience participation, communication and innovation, along with in-group attachment. These abilities empower QAnon to operate far beyond the methods and hierarchies of traditional political movements, religious cults or conspiracy theory mongers.
Trump was probably not that aware of LARPing by name, but he was a pop culture maven who had been performing most of his life. Having roleplayed a politician since the late-‘80s and worked with Cohn and conspiracy theories even longer, he applied that expertise to his third presidential race, which he wasn’t actually trying to win, according to many observers, just build brand awareness for his declining empire.
After his dramatic descent of the Trump Tower escalator in 2015, he unveiled a colorful CT about evil Mexicans before a surprisingly large crowd of young people. They turned out to be actors paid $50 each, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Themes like “make American great again” seemed cliche, but he sharpened them with his three-decade-old refrain of “America is in danger” and “only I can fix it,” which is Conspiracy Theory 101. Indeed, “Things are not as they seem,” “Secret enemies are plotting,” and “Only I can save you,” i.e. only an authoritarian leader who knows the game can succeed, are the trinitarian tenets of conspiracism.
Running mostly for publicity, Trump was liberated to be irreverent and spontaneous. A seasoned performer as well as megalomaniac, he flourished on the campaign trail, especially against a lackluster field of Republican candidates, who knew nothing of his tactics, let alone how to counter them. Seeing his strongest opponent as the similarly-conspiratorial Cruz, Trump bombarded him with CTs, from the claim he stole the Iowa caucus to the one about his father helping Oswald kill Kennedy, no less. The liberal press took Trump literally, lambasting him for lying, but many Americans viewed his statements figuratively or plausible and not unlike those of other politicians.
After the election, Trump kept vote rigging in the news with allegations the Dems stole the popular vote and by forming the Commission of Electoral Integrity, which failed to find any significant evidence and soon closed. It seems silly until one realizes: Trump was carefully crafting a robust stolen-election conspiracy theory and cementing it deep into the American psyche, along with supporting notions like “lying press” and “deep state,” a cany insurance policy for his new-found career in politics.
Conspiracy theories had come a long way from the ‘50s. By 2016, they ranged from routine, like “Hillary Clinton is hiding a debilitating disease,” to unhinged, like PizzaGate or “most birds are surveillance drones,” which was started as a joke by the barely-20-year-old Peter McIndoe (as he admitted in December 2021).
In October 2016, Wikileaks published the emails of Clinton’s campaign chairperson, which were hacked by Russians six months earlier, and PizzaGaters “deciphered” them to “discover” a subterranean realm of Democratic devil-worshippers. Given Russian troll armies were promoting fake news favoring Trump, we had arrived at a free-for-all, cyber world war, where a conspiracist with online expertise could besmirch almost any one or thing.
By expressing fears creatively, CTers can join forces with hipster skepticism and reactionary prejudice to earn low-cost entry to community leadership and, if they excel in the disinformation marketplace, real political power.
Much like religious faith, CTs help people manage life’s vagaries. By replacing informed speculation with a simple explanation of hidden forces, CTs generate a form of low-level mysticism, hence their popularity among yoga teachers, massage therapists and other new agers. For the true believer, CTs relieve existential angst, boost status, and provide both a noble quest and base outlet for anger. The unfulfilled predictions and Kafka-esque claims can be disappointing or disgusting, and some truthers drop out, but the vast majority continue to enjoy their community’s ability to provide psychological relief, entertainment and defense against ridicule. And they are constantly re-energized by new theories, fostering inflationary levels of fantasy.
In such a competitive CT market, the original Q—a twenty-something living in Nevada named Manuel Chavez, according to The Financial Times, whose first post, in October 2017, promised that Hillary Clinton was about to be arrested—decided to incorporate not only PizzaGate but almost all previous conspiracy theories.
Although Chavez claimed he did it as satire, to expose those repeating his lies, he and the other Qs fashioned the first super conspiracy theory, based on the keystone concept America is controlled by a secret society of Satanic, pederast Democrat politicians and celebrities. As if that were not perverse enough, they added cannibalism. Strange as it sounds, it was an easy sell to evangelical Christians, who truck in those metaphors, but also radicals on the right or extreme left, who see opponents in different terms but similarly evil.
After Trump’s inauguration, rather than becoming more presidential, as advisors suggested and opponents hoped, he decided to govern through CTs. Cohn’s “ten commandments” guided how he broke with allies and international organizations, cozied up to Russia, started a trade war with China, and dominated the media with his dumpster-fire, news-making methods. Moreover, Trump kissed the conspiratorial ring on InfoWars in October 2016, telling Alex Jones “Your reputation is amazing. I will not let you down,” and began forwarding QAnon tweets only a few weeks after Chavez started roleplaying Q in late 2017.
Trump doubled down with the pandemic. Hoping to keep alive the economy, his main transaction on offer to Americans, regardless of loss of life, he used every CT in the book: deny, exaggerate, blame others, and discredit authorities, while floating evermore CTs. Sure, Trump vocally supported rapid vaccine development and quietly got vaccinated, but that didn’t stop him from proselytizing quack cures and Covid CTs. Indeed, they were the low-hanging fruit he could use to feed his overall CT indoctrination, which he ramped up as the election approached while returning to his big CT project: election fraud.
As Trump increased his conspiracism, and QAnons became a colorful contingent at his rallies, the person roleplaying Q decided to renounce leadership, one of the few big CTers in history to voluntarily relinquish a mass movement. In his 2021 HBO documentary, “Q: Into the Storm”, the ever-dogged director Cullen Hoback exposed the last Q as Ron Watkins, whose father owned 8chan and 8kun, the 4chan-like website where Chavez posted. Platform ownership gave the Watkinses upstream tech control.
Watkins denies this charge vehemently, but he was a well-known QAnon influencer; he resigned as 8kun’s administrator on Election Day, 2020; and Q stopped posting that day as well, except for four short posts. Watkins resurfaced as a “conspiracy theory analyst,” sometimes consulted by news organizations, and he supported the Insurrection, but he advised his followers on Inauguration Day, “We have a new president sworn in, and it is our responsibility as citizens to respect the Constitution.”
Having probably been Q for over three years, Watkins considers himself a CT grandmaster. Indeed, after years living unconventionally in the Philippines and Japan, he moved back to the United States and declared for Congress, as a Republican in Arizona. Watkins obviously assumes he can excel in a party where many leaders spout bizarre fictions, many voters believe them, and the best theorist often wins.
Trump also had the option of bowing out gracefully on Election Day, especially after most of his staff accepted he lost the election, but decided instead to launch his unprecedented CT indoctrination campaign. It provided hope to millions of QAnons desperate for guidance after Q stopped posting, turning Trump into the de facto Q.
Under pressure from his risky gamble and all the CTs flying around, Trump converted from Cohn’s roleplaying CT management to McCarthy’s full believer. Although it opens him up to delusion and his followers to mass psychosis, “true belief” binds CT leaders more tightly together with followers. While Trump didn’t seem to believe birtherism, 9/11, or most other CTs, he obviously believes his vote-stealing charges, at least his simple mail-in ballot version, and that he can run it for years for his own benefit, if not that of the Republican Party, let alone America.
Many QAnons were discouraged or distraught when Trump didn’t retake the presidency during the election, the Insurrection, the Inauguration, on March 4th (Inauguration Day until 1933), or an undetermined summer, fall or winter event, as predicted by QAnon influencers or nonaligned CT celebrities like My Pillow owner Mike Lindell, who is still insisting Trump’s reinstatement is but days away.
By the end of 2021, one QAnon contingent was holding a vigil for the long-dead John F. Kennedy Jr, who their influencers claimed would emerge from hiding to become Trump’s vice-presidential candidate in 2024. Another faction was insisting the pandemic and/or vaccine are a “plandemic,” a genocide organized by the deep state, even as the unvaccinated, including many anti-vax activists, expire in ever greater numbers. Others have joined fascist militias or believers in the “secret space program,” or its ontological opposite, the “flat earth.”
Adding insult to injury, a QAnon hero, lieutenant general, ex-National Security Advisor and convicted felon Michael Flynn, denounced QAnon as “total nonsense” and a “disinformation campaign” developed by the C.I.A. Then Alex Jones attacked Trump for supporting vaccines, although that is a standard Jonesian ploy to roll back Trump’s CT market share and augment his own.
Alas, Trump is the best coifed, most plainspoken and agile conspiracy theorist America has ever seen. Despite his many obvious errors, he makes the often hysterical and disheveled Jones, as well as the sleazy Cohn, country lawyer McCarthy, triple-agent Flynn or porn-addicted Watkins, look like pikers. By roleplaying a tough president, a jocular celebrity or a side show barker, often in quick succession, while winking at QAnon and white supremacists, Trump is running multiple conpiracist cohorts with amazing effectiveness, as exemplified by January 6th but also his spectacular rebound as the leader of the Republican party.
Nevertheless, many people still find it hard to believe Trump’s strategy is based largely on conspiracy theories, and the media doesn’t emphasize it. In The Atlantic’s otherwise excellent “Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun” (12/6/21)), author Barton Gellman mentions conspiracy theories but only a couple of times.
In point of fact, Trump will go down in history as the CT master who almost pulled off the perfect conspiracy mirroring operation, using a CT about a stolen election to nearly steal an election, a tactic he will obviously repeat in the midterms, in 2024 and beyond. Along the way, he will make endless mirroring claims, like “The real insurrection was on November 3rd not January 6th,” and “They are making the Big Lie, not me.”
Given many Republicans have authoritarianism and CTing in their bones, a majority have come to believe—or they are roleplaying belief, or they don’t believe but have cravenly resigned themselves to—the notion of operating in the sweet spot between plausible deniability and CT psychosis. They hope that will provide the workaround to their party’s sinking voter rolls, inability to craft major policy, and abandonment of conservative values, even though the tactic is absurd on the face of it and risks destroying the Republican Party or even American democracy while literally driving many people crazy.
Like Trump, they drank the Kool-Aid. And it may take years of additional deaths from Covid, gun violence, opioids and amphetamines, or a low-intensity civil war—or for the progressives of either party to concoct a compelling enough counter narrative—for them to learn that lesson. Ironically, it is the one Roy Cohn tried to teach them: Believing unproven conspiracy theories is for chumps.
While believing conspiracy theories is a recipe for psychosis, preaching them without belief, as so many Republicans and rightwing media figures do, breaks all the basic social contracts, from simple honesty to the Golden Rule.
Truth and justice will probably prevail, as they have in the past. It may take years of suffering and a degradation of democracy worldwide, but history shows that Americans became fixated on CTs four times over the last two centuries, in about sixty-year cycles. Hence, the Republican embrace of deception and delusion should burn itself out, eventually, and inoculate us for the next half century, hopefully.
Posted on Jul 02, 2022 - 03:53 PM
by Doniphan Blair
Please support our stories by liking articles—thanks!
Trump's speech on January 6th, 2020, will surely go down as one of the greatest public brainwashing performances in history, equal to Hitler at Nuremberg. illo: D. BlairPEOPLE WHO BLAME DONALD TRUMP'S
behavior on narcissism or authoritarianism often neglect to note his political career has been based entirely on conspiracy theories. Indeed, he endorsed birtherism, the allegation that Obama was born in Kenya, specifically to bolster his 2012 presidential run. It may seem like an odd plank for a political platform, but conspiracism had become popular on the left, after 9/11 and among the anti-vaxxers, and on the right, with prejudices and phobias dating back to the 1950s and beyond.
Moreover, Trump is the scion of a conspiracy theory dynasty. He was best friends with Roy Cohn, the notorious New York lawyer and fixer but also national player and righthand man of Senator Joseph McCarthy during his ‘50s witch hunt for communists and gays. McCarthy’s political career was also based entirely on conspiracy theories.
Whether or not there was a sexual relationship, Cohn knew McCarthy intimately. McCarthy’s big mistake was not destabilizing America during the darkest days of the Cold War, according to Cohn, nor being addicted to gambling, alcohol and morphine, but drinking his own Kool-Aid. Believing CTs is for followers, Cohn realized, while CT leaders must remain free to invent and adapt. They also have to avoid the self-destruction of believing their own lies.
It was love at first sight in 1973 when Cohn met the 27-year-old Trump, who was searching for a lawyer to beat a federal probe of his company’s racist practices. Along with hiring Cohn, Trump adopted his transactionalism and public tactics—attack first, counter attack twice as hard, never admit error or defeat, always blame someone, file endless law suits, delay or deny payments, don’t pay taxes, donate to politicians, and manipulate the media—but also his secret hand: conspiracy theories.
According to McCarthy’s latest biographer, the deep-digging Larry Tye, in “Demagogue” (2020), “The aging Cohn taught the fledgling Trump the transcendent lessons he had learned from his master, McCarthy—how to smear opponents and contrive grand conspiracies.”
After becoming birtherism’s celebrity spokesperson, Trump went on to develop “grand” conspiracy theories about Mexicans and Muslims, but he came to specialize in voter fraud. Conspiracy theories about election theft are comparatively easy to initiate since the vote counting appears hidden in back rooms or on hard drives. Indeed, immediately after the 2012 election, Trump tweeted that Barack Obama "lost the popular vote by a lot," even though he won by five million votes, and that the Democrats stole the election from Mitt Romney. At the 2016 Iowa caucus, he denounced Republican Senator Ted Cruz for ballot stuffing and, a few months later, insisted the Democrats would steal the general election if he won.
On Election Day 2016, Trump supporters scrutinized polling places and trumped-up minor irregularities, which was promoted as “Stop the Steal” by Republican trickster Roger Stone, Trump’s campaign manager but also an old friend and fellow disciple of Roy Cohn. Trump won, mooting that point, but still availed himself of the opportunity to accuse the Democrats of stealing the popular vote, simply because such claims abide a cardinal rule of conspiracy theories: reinforce them relentlessly.
Although his allies and opponents alike attributed his narcissism or fear of losing, four years later, he campaigned on the conspiracy-based proposition that Democrats would cheat again, and he claimed a “landslide” victory on Election Night. He then proceeded to mount one of the greatest false narrative indoctrination campaigns in history, despite having failed to show a shred of evidence for election fraud in scores of court appearances.
Trump debuted his CT team on November 19th, 2020, at the Republican Party headquarters, a foreboding sign for that venerable institution. In addition to his blundering but equally conspiratorial lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, it featured the fast-talking Sidney Powell and her elaborate stories about votes being changed by Venezuela, China and voting machine companies. Powell’s CTs came directly from influencers in QAnon, the dark-fantasy conspiracy cult, which had hit the news six months earlier and shocked many Americans with its strangeness and number of adherents.
Trump unveiled his own “in depth” conspiracy analysis on December 2nd. Although his speech was so lie-laden not even Fox News carried it, its repetitive, declarative sentences were a master class in public brainwashing. Trump’s CT was based simply on voting law changes and mail-in ballot fraud, but he allowed Powell to introduce elaborate international intrigues two weeks earlier to provide his fans a full-service CT emporium replete with the fantastic stories CTers love to entertain.
When Trump didn’t concede, many Republicans and most Americans were stunned, and they found his theories ludicrous. Alas, he had been working on CTs for years; he knew his audience intimately; and he persisted monomaniacally. Assisted by Republican politicians and lawyers but also dirty tricksters and CT professionals, from his old friend Roger Stone to America’s premier conspiracy monger, Alex Jones, who started the popular show “Infowars” and pioneered the theory 9/11 was an inside job, he easily convinced naïve Trumpers, radical rightwingers and mystical QAnons. Indeed, many of all three cohorts were overjoyed when he announced the Stop the Steal movement was back, and he was holding a rally for it in Washington D.C. on January 6th.
The Insurrection became America’s biggest political crisis since the Civil War and the largest crime scene outside of 9/11 but also proof of Trump’s CT powers. It fulfilled many of his predictions and provided a dramatic performance piece around which to build a “saving democracy” fantasy. As crazy as it was—and Republican leaders and Fox commentators were frantically begging Trump to call it off, to save their very lives or legacy not to mention their sanity—later that night, eight senators, led by Ted Cruz, and 139 representatives endorsed Trump’s Big Lie by refusing to certify the Electoral College vote.
Republicans unfamiliar with conspiracy theories and Trump’s ability to manage them were understandably nervous. Nevertheless, despite a year of investigations and exposes about January 6th, from the strongarming of Vice President Mike Pence and the adoption of the fake electors strategy to the many judgements or cases pending against him, Trump is still able to rationalize to partisans his behavior, using euphemism, misdirection, lies, threats and, of course, conspiracy theories.
The big problem facing Trump, Trumpers and their facilitators, as well as those of us attempting to understand and oppose them, is: Once people allow themselves to believe one unsupported conspiracy theory, it is almost impossible to unbelieve, and they generally adopt others, since CTs operate almost entirely in the imagination.
Actual conspiracies, in distinction to the made-up variant, are common among criminals and spies, and not uncommon with politicians, business people, religious leaders and lovers. At any given time, therefore, some people are scheming and others are watching and wondering what they are up to—conspiracy theorizing, in other words.
For the professional conspiracy theorist, however, finding actual conspiracies is secondary to influencing public opinion and accruing power. Moreover, the conspiracy they are actually interested in is the one they are perpetrating themselves, using the conspiracy theory itself. As CT professionals, they finetune it to their followers’ psychology, introducing child abuse accusations, for example, to trigger abuse survivors.
Of course, “conspiracy theory” is also a standard slur against any unproven hypotheses. In addition, fanciful notions are central to religion and art, and they figure in science, business and romance. But when esoteric ideas pertain to religion or love, they must be more spiritual than materialist to operate, and those involving art or business are generally recognized as fiction or speculation.
In politics, however, CTs masquerade as fact.
Trump is not stupid or crazy, despite all appearances. Hardly “a very stable genius,” as he once bragged, he does have emotional intelligence, cracked charisma, and mad publicity and law-skirting skills. In fact, he often outflanks rivals or enemies, particularly those who see him as an idiot, instead of idiot savant, or who fail to imagine the depths to which he can descend.
Largely on that account, Trump acquired a football team, three casinos and an airline, in rapid succession in the ‘80s, even as he bankrupted them with aggressive business strategies, mismanagement and profit skimming. He stayed one step ahead of catastrophe by hustling tax abatements and high-interest loans, by threatening to sue, and by spinning sales pitches and stories, like the notion he was a “disruptor,” who was actually improving a given business, or that his failures were actually successes.
Hence, it can be said that Trump’s middle-to-late business career was also based entirely on conspiracy theories. “It is literally all a fraud, his life,” summarized the hard-working investigative journalist David Cay Johnston, author of three revealing books on Trump, in a 2016 interview.
Once a CT leader convinces followers of their authenticity, facts become fungible, and they can say the opposite of what media or authorities report, what can be called “conspiracy mirroring.” Claiming innocence and that one’s opponent is a criminal monster may seem like a schoolyard tactic, but it is psychologically astute and can give an established narrative a new interpretation simply by flipping a few facts. Conspiracy mirroring is central to conspiracism, in fact, as George Orwell pointed out in “1984,” with his fascist state’s slogan, “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
Trump learned to manipulate media from Roy Cohn, who started feeding leads to gossip columnists as a teen and had three high school friends become media moguls. Trump used Cohn’s media connections but also roleplaying aliases to plant stories about himself and threats of law suits to repress reports portraying him poorly. He especially opposed those impugning his inflated worth, which he deflates in turn for taxes. During the 2016 presidential campaign, the tabloid National Enquirer, owned for decades by Cohn’s childhood chum, Generoso Pope, buried over 50 damaging stories, including a Playboy model’s detailed allegation Trump raped her.
“Bad publicity is sometimes better than no publicity,” Trump explained in his “The Art of the Deal”, which became a bestseller for the mega-publisher Random House but was entirely ghostwritten. “Controversy, in short, sells.” Even the liberal press profits by covering Trump’s transgressions to excess, which provides their audience a popular schadenfreude but gives him free advertising.
Using his spectacle-making superpowers, Trump shifted from struggling real estate mogul to selling lifestyles, at first by licensing his pseudo-opulent brand to other developers. Then he ran beauty pageants, starred in a middling-popular reality television show, “The Apprentice”, and became a politician, starting with running for president, naturally, given his ego and ability to sell worldviews but also apprenticeship to Cohn.
Re-registering as a Republican, Trump tossed his hat into the ring a second time in 2011. Unlike during his brief 2000 campaign, as a pro-choice candidate with the Reform Party, he had a powerful trifecta of support mechanisms: the popularity of his show, the disciplinarian character he roleplayed on it, and the birtherism conspiracy theory. Although he soon realized Romney was a notably moral and capable Republican, and dropped out and endorsed him, he continued to explore his presidential ambitions through birtherism.
While modern life is based on science and facts, conspiracy theorists exploited a growing desire to oppose global, governmental or intellectual authorities and to embrace alternative views and fantasies. These interests started on the left, with the individualism, rebellion and truth questioning of the ‘60s, but were eventually adopted by the right and amplified by the digital age’s flood of information, social media algorithms, fake news and secretive side. The very year the internet blew up, 1995, so did rightwing conspiracism, with the white nationalist bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building, Newt Gingrich’s scorched earth takeover of Congress, Rush Limbaugh’s conspiracy theories about President Clinton, and the growth of evangelical millenarianism in the final days of the millennia.
Trump is not unique. Many of today’s political and cultural leaders are accomplished CT developers or manipulators, from Vladimir Putin to Fox commentators Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, or public conspiracy theorists, like Alex Jones and Q, the anonymous oracle behind QAnon.
Q’s bio has yet to be conclusively established, but there is strong evidence “he” is not a government insider with “Q-level clearance,” and there were a number of Qs, who usurped the group from each other. In point of fact, QAnon is not an actual cult or political movement but a “live action role playing game,” sometimes called an “alternative reality game.” A form of large group play, often based on scavenger hunts or costume play, LARPs were invented in 1996 by corporate creatives for use in advertising.
Q’s LARPing has been known since 2018 but has only been documented in full by one major news outlet, The Financial Times of London, in its 15-minute, October 15th, 2020, video, “Is QAnon a Game Gone Wrong?” That video has only been viewed on YouTube 80,000 times, as of this writing, which suggests that most people doubt something as earthshaking as QAnon could come from a LARP, run by a twenty-something on their phone. Nevertheless, journalists at The Washington Post and NBC News and researchers at Wikileaks and Cult Research Institute of New Jersey, who have investigated QAnon, have often used terms like “game-like” or “possible LARP.”
The most famous corporate LARP was “I Love Bees,” which promoted “Halo 2,” Microsoft’s megahit video game, in 2004. By that time, many gamers, hipsters and Burning Man attendees had started their own LARPs, some of which became popular or cult-like. By the time video games were grossing more than Hollywood films in 2010, gaming was dominating aspects of American culture. Meanwhile, the rest of us acquiesced to the internet’s intrinsic roleplaying and espionage, from inventing online aliases or dating profiles to making anonymous comments, snooping on each other, or fighting fraudsters.
Also around 2010, LARPs crossed into politics on 4chan, a bare-bones soc-med platform devoted to free speech and anonymity. Notorious for its porn and neo-Nazis as well as conspiracy theorists, 4chan also provided an internet commons for more normative rebels including Anonymous, the white-hat hacker association which started there.
In keeping with that nomenclature, people roleplaying intelligence agents turned leakers used aliases like FBIAnon and CIAAnon. Incorporating LARPing’s scavenger hunt and puzzle traditions, they encouraged followers to do their own research, decipher their cryptic posts, and uncover evermore conspiracies.
Indeed, CT proselytizing is itself a LARP. If you act the part of an enthusiastic conspiracy theorist, even though no one knows what you really believe, you can attract followers and attack opponents. LARPing increases audience participation, communication and innovation, along with in-group attachment. These abilities empower QAnon to operate far beyond the methods and hierarchies of traditional political movements, religious cults or conspiracy theory mongers.
Trump was probably not that aware of LARPing by name, but he was a pop culture maven who had been performing most of his life. Having roleplayed a politician since the late-‘80s and worked with Cohn and conspiracy theories even longer, he applied that expertise to his third presidential race, which he wasn’t actually trying to win, according to many observers, just build brand awareness for his declining empire.
After his dramatic descent of the Trump Tower escalator in 2015, he unveiled a colorful CT about evil Mexicans before a surprisingly large crowd of young people. They turned out to be actors paid $50 each, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Themes like “make American great again” seemed cliche, but he sharpened them with his three-decade-old refrain of “America is in danger” and “only I can fix it,” which is Conspiracy Theory 101. Indeed, “Things are not as they seem,” “Secret enemies are plotting,” and “Only I can save you,” i.e. only an authoritarian leader who knows the game can succeed, are the trinitarian tenets of conspiracism.
Running mostly for publicity, Trump was liberated to be irreverent and spontaneous. A seasoned performer as well as megalomaniac, he flourished on the campaign trail, especially against a lackluster field of Republican candidates, who knew nothing of his tactics, let alone how to counter them. Seeing his strongest opponent as the similarly-conspiratorial Cruz, Trump bombarded him with CTs, from the claim he stole the Iowa caucus to the one about his father helping Oswald kill Kennedy, no less. The liberal press took Trump literally, lambasting him for lying, but many Americans viewed his statements figuratively or plausible and not unlike those of other politicians.
After the election, Trump kept vote rigging in the news with allegations the Dems stole the popular vote and by forming the Commission of Electoral Integrity, which failed to find any significant evidence and soon closed. It seems silly until one realizes: Trump was carefully crafting a robust stolen-election conspiracy theory and cementing it deep into the American psyche, along with supporting notions like “lying press” and “deep state,” a cany insurance policy for his new-found career in politics.
Conspiracy theories had come a long way from the ‘50s. By 2016, they ranged from routine, like “Hillary Clinton is hiding a debilitating disease,” to unhinged, like PizzaGate or “most birds are surveillance drones,” which was started as a joke by the barely-20-year-old Peter McIndoe (as he admitted in December 2021).
In October 2016, Wikileaks published the emails of Clinton’s campaign chairperson, which were hacked by Russians six months earlier, and PizzaGaters “deciphered” them to “discover” a subterranean realm of Democratic devil-worshippers. Given Russian troll armies were promoting fake news favoring Trump, we had arrived at a free-for-all, cyber world war, where a conspiracist with online expertise could besmirch almost any one or thing.
By expressing fears creatively, CTers can join forces with hipster skepticism and reactionary prejudice to earn low-cost entry to community leadership and, if they excel in the disinformation marketplace, real political power.
Much like religious faith, CTs help people manage life’s vagaries. By replacing informed speculation with a simple explanation of hidden forces, CTs generate a form of low-level mysticism, hence their popularity among yoga teachers, massage therapists and other new agers. For the true believer, CTs relieve existential angst, boost status, and provide both a noble quest and base outlet for anger. The unfulfilled predictions and Kafka-esque claims can be disappointing or disgusting, and some truthers drop out, but the vast majority continue to enjoy their community’s ability to provide psychological relief, entertainment and defense against ridicule. And they are constantly re-energized by new theories, fostering inflationary levels of fantasy.
In such a competitive CT market, the original Q—a twenty-something living in Nevada named Manuel Chavez, according to The Financial Times, whose first post, in October 2017, promised that Hillary Clinton was about to be arrested—decided to incorporate not only PizzaGate but almost all previous conspiracy theories.
Although Chavez claimed he did it as satire, to expose those repeating his lies, he and the other Qs fashioned the first super conspiracy theory, based on the keystone concept America is controlled by a secret society of Satanic, pederast Democrat politicians and celebrities. As if that were not perverse enough, they added cannibalism. Strange as it sounds, it was an easy sell to evangelical Christians, who truck in those metaphors, but also radicals on the right or extreme left, who see opponents in different terms but similarly evil.
After Trump’s inauguration, rather than becoming more presidential, as advisors suggested and opponents hoped, he decided to govern through CTs. Cohn’s “ten commandments” guided how he broke with allies and international organizations, cozied up to Russia, started a trade war with China, and dominated the media with his dumpster-fire, news-making methods. Moreover, Trump kissed the conspiratorial ring on InfoWars in October 2016, telling Alex Jones “Your reputation is amazing. I will not let you down,” and began forwarding QAnon tweets only a few weeks after Chavez started roleplaying Q in late 2017.
Trump doubled down with the pandemic. Hoping to keep alive the economy, his main transaction on offer to Americans, regardless of loss of life, he used every CT in the book: deny, exaggerate, blame others, and discredit authorities, while floating evermore CTs. Sure, Trump vocally supported rapid vaccine development and quietly got vaccinated, but that didn’t stop him from proselytizing quack cures and Covid CTs. Indeed, they were the low-hanging fruit he could use to feed his overall CT indoctrination, which he ramped up as the election approached while returning to his big CT project: election fraud.
As Trump increased his conspiracism, and QAnons became a colorful contingent at his rallies, the person roleplaying Q decided to renounce leadership, one of the few big CTers in history to voluntarily relinquish a mass movement. In his 2021 HBO documentary, “Q: Into the Storm”, the ever-dogged director Cullen Hoback exposed the last Q as Ron Watkins, whose father owned 8chan and 8kun, the 4chan-like website where Chavez posted. Platform ownership gave the Watkinses upstream tech control.
Watkins denies this charge vehemently, but he was a well-known QAnon influencer; he resigned as 8kun’s administrator on Election Day, 2020; and Q stopped posting that day as well, except for four short posts. Watkins resurfaced as a “conspiracy theory analyst,” sometimes consulted by news organizations, and he supported the Insurrection, but he advised his followers on Inauguration Day, “We have a new president sworn in, and it is our responsibility as citizens to respect the Constitution.”
Having probably been Q for over three years, Watkins considers himself a CT grandmaster. Indeed, after years living unconventionally in the Philippines and Japan, he moved back to the United States and declared for Congress, as a Republican in Arizona. Watkins obviously assumes he can excel in a party where many leaders spout bizarre fictions, many voters believe them, and the best theorist often wins.
Trump also had the option of bowing out gracefully on Election Day, especially after most of his staff accepted he lost the election, but decided instead to launch his unprecedented CT indoctrination campaign. It provided hope to millions of QAnons desperate for guidance after Q stopped posting, turning Trump into the de facto Q.
Under pressure from his risky gamble and all the CTs flying around, Trump converted from Cohn’s roleplaying CT management to McCarthy’s full believer. Although it opens him up to delusion and his followers to mass psychosis, “true belief” binds CT leaders more tightly together with followers. While Trump didn’t seem to believe birtherism, 9/11, or most other CTs, he obviously believes his vote-stealing charges, at least his simple mail-in ballot version, and that he can run it for years for his own benefit, if not that of the Republican Party, let alone America.
Many QAnons were discouraged or distraught when Trump didn’t retake the presidency during the election, the Insurrection, the Inauguration, on March 4th (Inauguration Day until 1933), or an undetermined summer, fall or winter event, as predicted by QAnon influencers or nonaligned CT celebrities like My Pillow owner Mike Lindell, who is still insisting Trump’s reinstatement is but days away.
By the end of 2021, one QAnon contingent was holding a vigil for the long-dead John F. Kennedy Jr, who their influencers claimed would emerge from hiding to become Trump’s vice-presidential candidate in 2024. Another faction was insisting the pandemic and/or vaccine are a “plandemic,” a genocide organized by the deep state, even as the unvaccinated, including many anti-vax activists, expire in ever greater numbers. Others have joined fascist militias or believers in the “secret space program,” or its ontological opposite, the “flat earth.”
Adding insult to injury, a QAnon hero, lieutenant general, ex-National Security Advisor and convicted felon Michael Flynn, denounced QAnon as “total nonsense” and a “disinformation campaign” developed by the C.I.A. Then Alex Jones attacked Trump for supporting vaccines, although that is a standard Jonesian ploy to roll back Trump’s CT market share and augment his own.
Alas, Trump is the best coifed, most plainspoken and agile conspiracy theorist America has ever seen. Despite his many obvious errors, he makes the often hysterical and disheveled Jones, as well as the sleazy Cohn, country lawyer McCarthy, triple-agent Flynn or porn-addicted Watkins, look like pikers. By roleplaying a tough president, a jocular celebrity or a side show barker, often in quick succession, while winking at QAnon and white supremacists, Trump is running multiple conpiracist cohorts with amazing effectiveness, as exemplified by January 6th but also his spectacular rebound as the leader of the Republican party.
Nevertheless, many people still find it hard to believe Trump’s strategy is based largely on conspiracy theories, and the media doesn’t emphasize it. In The Atlantic’s otherwise excellent “Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun” (12/6/21)), author Barton Gellman mentions conspiracy theories but only a couple of times.
In point of fact, Trump will go down in history as the CT master who almost pulled off the perfect conspiracy mirroring operation, using a CT about a stolen election to nearly steal an election, a tactic he will obviously repeat in the midterms, in 2024 and beyond. Along the way, he will make endless mirroring claims, like “The real insurrection was on November 3rd not January 6th,” and “They are making the Big Lie, not me.”
Given many Republicans have authoritarianism and CTing in their bones, a majority have come to believe—or they are roleplaying belief, or they don’t believe but have cravenly resigned themselves to—the notion of operating in the sweet spot between plausible deniability and CT psychosis. They hope that will provide the workaround to their party’s sinking voter rolls, inability to craft major policy, and abandonment of conservative values, even though the tactic is absurd on the face of it and risks destroying the Republican Party or even American democracy while literally driving many people crazy.
Like Trump, they drank the Kool-Aid. And it may take years of additional deaths from Covid, gun violence, opioids and amphetamines, or a low-intensity civil war—or for the progressives of either party to concoct a compelling enough counter narrative—for them to learn that lesson. Ironically, it is the one Roy Cohn tried to teach them: Believing unproven conspiracy theories is for chumps.
While believing conspiracy theories is a recipe for psychosis, preaching them without belief, as so many Republicans and rightwing media figures do, breaks all the basic social contracts, from simple honesty to the Golden Rule.
Truth and justice will probably prevail, as they have in the past. It may take years of suffering and a degradation of democracy worldwide, but history shows that Americans became fixated on CTs four times over the last two centuries, in about sixty-year cycles. Hence, the Republican embrace of deception and delusion should burn itself out, eventually, and inoculate us for the next half century, hopefully.
Posted on Jul 02, 2022 - 03:53 PM
