Joseph Uscinski: "Conspiracy Theories are for Losers"

our speaker today Joey skinsky is an American political scientist currently working as an associate professor at the University of Miami his work and research is most notably that on conspiracy theories and the American public examining why groups buy into conspiracy theories he received his bachelor's degree from Plymouth State University his master's from University of New Hampshire and his doctorate from the University of Arizona in 2014 he published a book co-authored with Joseph's parent titled American conspiracy theories as an EM CSI fellow we received this book prior to summer break and I had a fascinating time reading it on my family's cruise vacation specifically reading American conspiracy theories as I sunbathe on the Lido deck I'm guessing I probably weirded out all the grandmas and preteens in my proximity with my choice of summer reading material the hypothesis of his book and this lecture conspiracy theories are for losers examines the mentality and politics of believing in conspiracy theories in various social groups and political ideologies please join me in giving a warm welcome to our wonderful afternoon speaker definitely not a loser Joseph he's Kinsey well thank you for that kind introduction and thank you Brian for having me out Thank You Pitts sir thank you all for coming I'm competing with a very gorgeous day out there and because of that I promise I will make this worth your while that's me that's my information she did not lie to you if you want to tweet along that's my Twitter handle you could say I hate this talk or I love this talk and whatever you want if you want to see me on Facebook or there's my this is the title of the talk you guys are fairly tame I was doing this talk across England the summer and I was getting protested at every single stop that I did and you know I define the term loser in my work not in a pejorative way but in a descriptive way so by looser I mean somebody who's on the outside somebody who perhaps is it a party that just lost an election somebody who's not part of the mainstream and I guess I could say that and the theory but it just doesn't have the ring that loser has and I'm more than happy to agitate people in order to get them to come to the talks even if it is to protest but it doesn't look like you're planning out protesting so two things my mother told me never to discuss religion and politics I would add a third thing to that and that's conspiracy theories politics and religion are difficult to discuss if you don't believe me when you go home next month for Thanksgiving break wait till a couple of bottles of wine have gone down and then start talking about Trump or something like that if you really want to push the envelope start bringing up a few of your favorite conspiracy theories and see what your extended family has to say about them my guess is you may not be invited back next year and the reason for that is fairly simple you're not going to change minds about politics you're not going to change minds about religion and conspiracy theories touch on those two things what is true and who has power and what are they doing in with it when we're not looking and those are things that people hold very sacred to them so they're difficult topics to negotiate so let's see if we can perhaps negotiate some of some of that during this talk so I'm going to define two terms I'm going to use for you so the first is conspiracy conspiracies are real Watergate is a prime example so a conspiracy is a group of people who act in secret for their own benefit and against the common good and what I'm talking about conspiracy I'm talking about big things like threats to our bedrock institutions you know like Watergate we're gonna try to break into the other party that's a threat to our bedrock institutions of democracy we're not talking about things like I'm trying to knock over the 7-eleven or you know the woman and her mistress try to assassinate her cuckold husband okay we're not talking about the smallest things we're talking about the bigger stuff so watergate's one example the Tuskegee experiments are a second example there the government was injecting into the eyeballs and spines of African Americans and Guatemalan citizens syphilis and then not telling them for 50 years and letting them have all the side effects and finally they came out and apologized iran-contra is another example where they were trading trading arms to hostile nations illegally now a conspiracy theory in deference to there is a accusatory proposed explanation that invokes a conspiracy so in this case many people think that JFK was killed by a conspiracy perhaps one that has to do with Fidel Castro or the CIA or the Mafia or the Soviet Union or Lyndon Johnson you take your pick everyone has their own villain in this one but this is an accusatory perception one that runs counter to the official wisdom which is the Warren Report which says no there was no conspiracy so these ideas remain conspiracy theories the ones that are adopted by our official institutions are knowledge giving institutions are conspiracies so how many Americans agree with these different conspiracy theories that are out there so about 60% right now believe in some form of JFK assassination this is actually a lower number than it was in the late 90s it was almost 80% in the late 90s part of that was an x-file effect and in the effect of the movie JFK and I'm proud to say that during the Oliver Stone's JFK movie they mentioned one University which was involved in the in the assassination and that's the University of Miami so you have a reason to suspect me of something right off the bat 25 percent think that Barack Obama faked his birth certificate to illegally assert power an equal number think that the Bush administration or the jews or the saudis blew up two twin towers on 9/11 twenty one percent think the military are hiding alien visits to roswell new mexico 20 percent think that pharmaceutical companies are hiding the true dangerous effects of vaccines they may cause autism 9 percent think that floor causes bad things to happen to you perhaps that it dulls you down and makes you ready to become a communist that's what some of them say but if you if you follow some of the Facebook pages for anti fluoride activists these are people you probably don't want to hang around with because they don't brush their teeth six percent believe that the moon landing was faked and that's sort of interesting cuz if you ask people what are the big conspiracy theories you know that come to mind when I say conspiracy theory people will say the moon landing you know it's popular as a conspiracy theory but now popular in the sense that anyone really believes in it's very few people that think that was faked five percent think that the lines you see in the sky that are left by airplanes are poison that are being put there in order to do population control this one gets kind of cute there's a video on YouTube of Prince before he died saying you know I know what's going on with those chemtrails and every time the plane would fly over that the stuff would come down and make us angry and it would injure us I don't believe that's true and if you were ever gonna poison a population of people the absolute worst way to do it would be to put the poison 35,000 feet in the air because for the most part it just goes down to the ocean so five percent of people think that four percent of people when we pull nationwide think that we are ruled by a group of reptilian shapeshifters and I got kind of nervous because I got a sunburn last week and I knew I was going to peel during the talk and I was like someone's going to accuse me of being a lizard person molting and I can assure you that's not true these things matter these beliefs seem funny like haha other people believe it but they enter our politics in almost every issue so if you think that 9/11 was a hoax then you're gonna think the airport security you're gonna think that measures to monitor terrorism you know think the war on terror is all a hoax to SAP our freedom or part of some other plot if you think the Mexican government is sending people here to rape and murder us you're not going to be in favor immigration policies that allow more people in if you think the pharmaceutical company only makes drugs to make a sick and profit back when they make us better with another drug you're not going to like pharmaceuticals if you think that Monsanto is evil you're not gonna want to buy GM food and he'll do all your shopping at Whole Foods if you think that the one-percent secretly controls everything you'll be into a different sort of tax policy than other people and the list goes on if you think that the government is too big and run by shadowy bureaucrats you'll think the deep state is out to get us and if you think that the Communists have taken over you know every college department particularly the climatology departments on college campuses and the UN then you're gonna think that climate change is a hoax intended to bring about a new totalitarian society so these beliefs matter and and they affect the effect ultimate policy during the Ebola scare of 2013 and this was shared half a million times on Facebook people were freaking about about Ebola there was a big outbreak in Africa and this gets shared it was pushed by Alex Jones Infowars it said that Africans were catching Ebola dying and then rising from the grave as Ebola zombies in search of brains to eat half a million times on Facebook now luckily this was not true and because when we looked into it we found that's not actually an Ebola zombie but rather an extra from a Brad Pitt movie about zombies well World War Z if anyone if anyone remembers that one so people get into weird weird stuff right now that's where I live these numbers are actually uh if we were to update them these numbers would be in the thousands but we have a Zika crisis going on in South Florida right now people are very afraid of what's going on and just as you have fears about vaccines like the MMR vaccine having negative side effects that are being hidden you have people thinking that not only will a via Zika vaccine be a hoax when it's developed but they think the entire diseases a hoax that it's been created for some nefarious purpose so I did some polling on this and when we asked people you know this is what the CDC says the cause of Zika is you know it's a disease that was found on the 1940s what do you think the cause of Zika is and gave people a list that they can choose from the four top answers that they gave were genetically modified mosquitoes pharmaceutical companies the government and vaccines were the causes of the Zika virus and what's so dangerous about this and if you add these up you get of about 20% of the population that thinks that these are the things that are going to be used to cure the Zika virus vaccines genetically modified mosquitoes distributed by pharmaceutical companies and the government we often see cycles of conspiracy if you remember what they were saying about Hillary Clinton in the during the last campaign Trump started a rumor saying you know she's not fit enough to be President she's physically unhealthy so that led her to hide her illness when she actually did get sick if you travel around for you know and shake everybody's hand you're going to catch the flu she did catch the flu and at a 9/11 ceremony they had ushered her into a van because she had passed out from the flu and they gave her fluids and she was fine of course the Trump campaign comes out and says you know she's obviously dying and then they had pictures of her afterwards where they say this is a body double not her you could see the hips are differently shaped so what does she have to do she goes on the Jimmy Kimmel show and to show that she's really spry and healthy and fit enough to be President she opens up a pickle jar on the stage to show that she's strong okay she does that then the next morning the conspiracy theory is the pickle jar was already opened so you can't really win but you see this you see this idea where it's you have the accusation of conspiracy driving people to certain action and then it leads to more conspiracy theories you you have violence that sometimes spring from these beliefs in December of last year you had a man walk into a pizza shop in Washington DC he was there to investigate with a loaded gun what he thought was a child sex ring which he thought was hidden underneath the pizza establishment he thought there was a secret train that would bring the children in to be molested they would molest the children kill them and throw them in the pizza oven this is very you know drawn out he goes in with a gun looks around finds the door that's gonna lead him to the secret chamber opens it and is very disappointed to find a mop closet and luckily he was arrested shortly after that but there are many examples like this where people get conspiracy theories in their head and then they act on them in very deleterious ways Robert dear who shot up the Planned Parenthood clinic two years ago he had a metal roof on his house and he encouraged his neighbors to do so to keep the government rays from coming in and stealing his thoughts there was a guy in Minneapolis who luckily the FBI caught him in advance but he was gonna go shoot up the freemason temple because he believed that the Freemasons were involved in a conspiracy against Muslims and the snar neve brothers who did the bombing at the Boston Marathon when 9/11 truthers - so you wind up with a lot of examples of people committing violence based on conspiracy theories so that's why they're important so the question is how can we explain this and there have been a lot of previous answers almost any time you read about conspiracy theories you will see this person show up that's Richard Hofstadter so his idea is this is a psychopathology you have people living out on the fringe they just have weird ideas there's something wrong with them and he pointed to the John Birch Society um you know people who are ultra far-right and let's sort of set this academic tone for the last 60 years where the idea is that conspiracy theories are largely you know on the domain of the right and that's that may not be true other people think that you know conspiracy theories are just cognitive shortcuts you know the world is a messy place I want to find something that's simple to explain events that are hard to explain I don't think this is true and the reason is that you know it'll just give you one example 9/11 conspiracy theories are far more complicated than nineteen dudes with knives and box cutters pulling off an incredible stunt I mean if you look at some of the conspiracy theories online they're incredibly complicated so many many people are not looking to simplify their thinking with conspiracy theories often time they make it much more much more complicated some people say it's anti-semitism or racism but a lot of conspiracy theories really have nothing to do with this a lot of people say it's the Internet that drives conspiracy theorizing I would say it's been around long before that before the internet popped up a lot of people like to blame the internet for everything but we blame every new technology for everything and and and I think we just need to step back a little bit from those claims and just realize that some some things that we blame technology for just part of the human condition some people think social change drives conspiracy theories and that was part of the Hofstadter's thesis now it's so much the case because there's always social change so that doesn't get us very far some people think it's just conservatives and I will try to prove to you it's neither conservatives or just political extremists so three questions I'll answer why do people believe them what are they for and then what is conspiracy theory politics so my data come from three places national surveys that I've been running over the last five years to get a longer overtime measure I've looked at the letters to the editor of the New York Times gathered a sample of about a thousand letters per year from 1890 to 2010 had my graduate students read all hundred and twenty thousand of them that's what they look like when they were done there was a lot of reading and what we did with the letters as we looked at we read every single one of them picked out the ones that espoused or discussed a conspiracy theory and looked at you know what group was being accused of conspiring and then just to look at the internet I look at some Google Trends and Google Alerts data does anyone get this picture that's not supposed to be there so let me just start with a very broad question why do people believe in anything at all so you think about we go out in the world it's a messy place how do we make sense of all the information that's coming in well for any opinion the basic model that we have is any opinion is made of a new piece of information coming in laid over a predisposition that helps us interpret that new piece of information so to give you one example during the last month of the Obama administration the jobs number came out and was holding steady about four point seven percent Democrats looked at that number and said Wow Obama when you came in there was a massive recession now you're leaving unemployment sway down thanks Obama Republicans look at that the exact same number and said that number is now picking up on what's really going on out there and worse that number may even be fixed thanks Obama same exact information two very different interpretations so it's not information that's driving you know how we see the world it's our underlying dispositions that drives most of it the most important one that I deal with because I'm a political scientist is our partisanship the partisanship is very sticky once it's sort of ingrained in us when we're thirty we're gonna be that thing most likely for the rest of our lives some people change but the majority of people don't and we treat our party as if it's a tribe my tribe is good or the good people even if we do something bad well we did it for the right reasons but the other side they're dodgy and they can't be trusted and when they do something bad it's because they're evil and they can't be forgiven so very strong very you know there's a lot of power in that predisposition there so what winds up happening is that our predispositions drive us to seek out information in the world that matches what we already believe so Republicans watch Fox Democrats watch CNN and MSNBC we choose information environments that make us to feel good if you don't believe me go out and you know if you're not a Republican go put on rush limbaugh for a little while and see how you feel you might be shaking or if you're a Republican go watch Rachel Maddow you know you'll have a very stressed tense feeling and what you'll come to realize is that it's very easy for us to follow the things that tell us what we want to hear so we wind up self sorting - listening to what we want - and in particular we listen to partisan leaders so Republicans listen to leaders on their side Democrats listen to the leaders on their side so that's where we get most of our opinions from so just to give you a few examples of how powerful this is when Barack Obama decided that he was in favor of gay marriage a lot of people were worried about whether the black community would follow him in that because the polls showed that African mayor African Americans were actually the group that was most against gay marriage in the country so they thought will they turn against him because of us and what they found was once Barack Obama changed his mind so did the black community and you see a massive change in their opinions on gay marriage there's a great experiment done on Trump voters before the election where vote people who wanted to vote for Trump were told one of three things Trump wants to keep the minimum wage the same Trump wants to lower it Trump wants to raise it no matter what condition they were told they went along with it and that's funny because as Republicans they should be like either get rid of the minimum wage or keep it the same but not raise it but no matter what they were told they would go along with it there's a really great comedy sketch that was done on Hulu would triumph the insult comic dog where they set up a little roundtable of Trump voters that they found at a mall so they don't know that this is fake and they bring them in and they say here are some ideas that Trump came up with and we want to see what you think about them one of them was to put chips in the necks of Mexico so that we could then trap them in porta-potties and then ship them back over the border and the people at the roundtable said yeah we think that's a pretty good idea another one was to deal with the transgender bathroom issue that they were gonna put loaded guns and bats in women's bathroom so that they could protect themselves from the transgender throughout and the people around the table that sounds like a really good idea so no matter what they were told they said this sounds Agria now both these ideas are absolutely horrid ideas right like horrible but when they were told your leader wants to do this to say yeah that sounds ok this is my state Florida but the exact opposite thing happened here a few years ago when legalizing marijuana failed they had an initiative to make medical marijuana legal in Florida three years ago and was polling 80% had to get 60 and what happened was a billionaire casino mogul named Sheldon Adelson gave a bunch of money to Republicans in Florida you know he's trafficking in booze and gambling but I guess pot is just a step too far for him so he gave money to Republicans to come out and run a campaign against it and they said don't let Florida go to pot all of a sudden Republicans changed their mind on medical marijuana and it failed the exact same thing happened here I think five or six years ago when it didn't pass when attempt now is here but it was Democrats who would change their mind on it and then the the Democratic voters pulled their support from it - but perhaps my favorite example of this comes from this guy Herman Cain he ran for the Republican nomination for president in 2012 his claim to fame was that he had previously been a successful CEO but fathers pizza it just so happened that during the time he was running his former employer was doing the brand satisfaction survey and they were asking a sample of Americans every week you know what do you think about Godfather's Pizza now as the campaign went on and people started to associate Kane with Republicans and Godfather's Pizza what we found was that Republicans started to like the pizza more and Democrats started to like the pizza less course is the same freaking pizza but people change their mind on it because they had this cue going on so the way I think about conspiracies is that or conspiracy theory belief is that just as partisanship drives us to have specific opinions I think that people also have this other predisposition which I'll call conspiracy thinking which then drives them to adopt specific conspiracy beliefs so just as Republicans will adopt Republican beliefs Democrats will adopt Democrat believes people who thinking conspiratorial terms are more likely to adopt conspiracy theories and people who don't engage and so much of that thinking so just to measure conspiracy thinking I gave people three statements and you know ask them on a scale how true do you think these are from definitely true to definitely not true our lives are being controlled by plots hatched in secret places we live in a democracy but only a few people ever run things and the people who really run the country are not known to the voters so I got our survey respondents to answer these questions put them together into one measure and I called it conspiracy thinking and that's essentially what it looks like as most people sort of show up somewhere in the agree neither agree nor disagree area and what this measure winds up predicting is their belief in specific conspiracy theories how many groups they think are out to get them so for example people on the high end of the scale I say here's a list of groups how many do you think are conspiring against us right now the people on the high end of the scale picked five groups people on the low end pick one group if you think five groups are out to get you you're not going out at night so you see this big disparity between between people so if I was to ask you right now you know to close your eyes and just think for a minute what's the character of the prototypical conspiracy theorist what does that person look like they don't want to tell me what they think that person is what color are they white overweight maybe yeah middle-aged perhaps ok politics libertarian maybe but probably probably more conservative perhaps free-market yeah so white male middle-aged conservative sounds like me I'm not balding now but those guys he's balding you know that and he definitely is so there's sort of this character that this is what they're like but in fact what the data tell us is a very different story is that conspiracy thinking cuts evenly across mantle and female it cuts across race it cuts across age partisanship and ideology perfectly equally so just to give you an example the popular daytime show that's hosted by women largely targeted at women the view almost every host on that show espouses conspiracy theories Jenny McCarthy espouse vaccine conspiracy theories Whoopi Goldberg thinks the moon landing was faked and Rosie O'Donnell thinks jet fuel can't melt steel so she's a 9/11 truther the better predictors of conspiracy thinking our wealth and education the more educated the more wealthy you are the less likely you are to thinking conspiratorial terms why that is I don't know yeah I mean the causal direction could be going in either direction could be the case that if you're hiring a CEO for a fortune 500 company and someone comes in and says hey I think those are people rule the world you're not going to hire that person so it could be that these people are being kept out it could be on the other hand that they're choosing not to enter certain arenas so if you don't like the establishment if you think it's a scam then you're likely not going to get more educated and you may not be able to get into those higher paying jobs other characteristics so the people who really thinking Inspira C terms the politics tend to be third parties tend to have a lot of conspiracy thinkers in them Green Party is one example not so much the Libertarian Party but some of them do but the politics are that there are people who thinking conspiratorial terms are less likely to volunteer for a campaign less likely to register to vote less likely to vote they just don't want to take part same thing in economics people who think in conspiratorial terms don't invest in the stock market even controlling for wealth do you think it's all rigged you're not going to take part and they are slightly more accepting of violence only asking surveys so that does it does sort of match what we you know what we see out there when we ask people who do you think is conspiring against us Republicans and Democrats like a mirror image pointing fingers at each other so there we see Democrats in blue think that corporations the Conservatives are conspiring against us and Republicans in red think the Communists and liberals are out to get us mirror images both pointing fingers at each other and we see this so that so the the 9/11 truther theory believed mostly by Democrats almost 40% of Democrats believe that almost 40% of Republicans believe that Barack Obama faked his birth certificate and when so when we pull on that again we see this mirror image Republicans believing in the birther theory Democrats believing in the truth their theory independence buying into both but only a little bit less now if we think of this in two dimensions and we can sort of explain why political conspiracy theories spread and how many people they're able to attract so if you think of one dimension Democrats to Republicans you have your left-to-right dimension but then a second dimension people who really thinking conspiracy terms and people who who are less likely to do so what you find is that you know your Democrat or high conspiracy thinkers think that Bush regime engineered 9/11 and the Republicans who think in conspiratorial terms believe that Barack Obama faked his birth certificate both of these cap out at about 25 percent at their apex so the good news is a partisan conspiracy theory' maxes out about 25% the bad news is you have 50% of the population believing in one of these two okay so there's good and bad news there we hope that generally you know some of those ideas prevail but wait you ask what about that Kennedy conspiracy theory they had 60% why is that able to garner so much and this funny headline kind of tells us why given the number of villains that have been proposed there should have been eight hundred bullets shooting at this guy while he was driving around when people poll or when polling houses poll on Kennedy they always ask do you think there was a conspiracy and everyone comes up with their own conspiracy theory in their own villain and that's why you get such a high number but when you drill down a little bit and say who do you think pulled the trigger was it the Mafia was it LBJ you wind up with one smaller agreement on each of those just like partisanship operates that way there are other ideologies that we have that do the same thing so how many of you are familiar with the da Vinci Code dr. Robert Langdon so the idea here is that Jesus had children with Mary Magdalene and those children went on to be the Merovingian kings of France or something like that so the people who tend to believe these da vinci code theories are people who buy into like New Wave ID you know New Age ideologies people who have alternative ideas about religion mysticism if you're that person you're not so much into the into the Jesus had children idea so other ideologies drives us this is what I'm actually originally from New Hampshire and this is one that sort of speaks to to my football team so there was this controversy called deflategate there was a game that the New England Patriots won where there was an accusation that the quarterback Tom Brady had deflated the balls before the game which would make them easier to catch and this one all the way through several courts went through federal court and Tom Brady they actually upheld his suspension but it was a big deal and it was all sorts of conspiracy theories going on was Brady hiding something was the NFL hiding something but anyway so who believed that Brady had conspired to deflate the balls I mean every everybody outside of New England thought that he had cheated so everywhere they played you're a cheater but when he was at home in New England where I'm from they thought his balls were perfect so depending on where you're from and depending on what your other views are these are all Patriots fans here they think that he didn't do anything wrong everyone else he's guilty and that explains a lot about people so what about you know what about the internet so people like to blame the internet for everything and conspiracy theories are no different but there's no evidence right now that can that belief in conspiracy theories has increased due to the internet that evidence may come along but we have yet to see oh there are millions of conspiracy theories that pop up on the internet but that itself tells you that the Internet is a very hostile place to conspiracy theories because I look at the conspiracy theories every day on Twitter and they're here today and they're gone tomorrow with the wind most of them just disappear right into the night without attracting many likes or retweets so it's not like you know you read about in some news articles where they say they go on the internet and everyone shares them no it's just not true most died when you look at web traffic even the biggest conspiracy websites like Infowars don't even come close to the Washington Post or the New York Times so the last time I checked Infowars is ranked 321 in the u.s. in terms of web traffic you know the New York Times is in the top five and I think there was about 250 porn sites in between those two so people are going to the internet to do all sorts of things before they're going to look at conspiracy theories and there's another way to look at the effect of the Internet to now we don't always take a account that we now have access to authoritative sources you know when I was a kid and I get sunburned you know my grandmother would village wisdom to cure my sunburn and that would involve rubbing butter on me don't do that that's terrible I mean that's the best village wisdom but now you can Google should I put butter on somebody with us it says no you know and you can hear direct information from dermatologists that's exactly what to do when you get a sunburn and you find that in politics and medicine in anywhere there's so much expertise available on the internet now you don't have to follow conspiracy theories are made up you know village beliefs um so that should be working in the opposite direction ideology still filters what we believe so it's not like you know we go to the internet and find stuff that we're not looking for if I don't like conspiracy theories I don't go looking for them and if I don't like left-wing stuff I don't go to left-wing websites so people look for what they want to look for and for the most part elites really still drive beliefs you know yes it's absolutely true that there's tons of conspiracy theories lurking around all the dark corners of the internet but nobody's going there and you can google anything in fact find a ton of you know find a ton of hits go google duck confit recipe you will find more than half a million hits but no one's going home to cook duck confit tonight just like there aren't tons of people looking for conspiracy theories so it's not the panacea that some people have made it out to be so one hypothesis that's often put out with the internet is that is that there's implicitly this hurting behavior that goes on so that somebody puts a conspiracy theory on to social media people see it and then just start indiscriminately spreading it so just like when cattle start running the other cattle start running too so you would see herd behavior question is do we find that with conspiracy theories now we do find it with things that aren't conspiracy theories and just to look this is a measure of people looking up mindfulness on Google over time they see mindfulness became a saying and some people got into it and then more and more and more and more people so you see this herding behavior take place and mindfulness was sort of one of those new ideas that came out wasn't very well evidenced it might be now but the time was fairly dubious so you can't see the idea can gain traction another one that popped up was colon cleanse and you could see the same exact curve you know you have some people get into colon cleanses and it spreads and people think oh this is a great idea but you don't find that with conspiracy theories instead what you find is a complete elite driven thing so this is Obama's birth certificate and you don't see hurting behavior what you stand to see instead is elite driven spikes here and here you have the media talking all about the birth certificate right before the election in 2008 here you have Trump talking about it in 2011 and if I was to go 2 months more here you would see a spike right before the 2016 election when Trump and Hillary Clinton started talking about it again so conspiracy theories particularly partisan ones are really driven by you know by elite sources like here so what are conspiracy theories for I'll just read this to you very briefly so conspiracy theories if you were to talk about who's gonna be accused and when will those people be accused conspiracy theories are used by vulnerable groups to manage dangers they are early warning systems to keep watch over sensitive areas and prepare solutions to potential attacks at their bottom conspiracy theories are threat perception there are about fears that are driven by shifts in power and because defeat and exclusion are their biggest inducements conspiracy theories are for losers so to test that we looked at our letters to the editor data and we got this is what all the conspiracy letters over time look like so right and left equal number of letters capitalists and communists near equal number of letters Americans love to accuse foreigners and foreign governments of conspiring against us and we can think about Trump's strategies with conspiracy theories he could not have picked a better mantra because Americans are always afraid of other countries so going out talking about Isis and immigrants and Mexicans I'm just played right into a man people already already feared if you to look at this data over time what you find is that in the years when a Republican is president most of the conspiracy theories focus on conservatives Republicans the wealthy and big corporations and you find the opposite when a Democrats president most of the conspiracy theories focus on communists socialists and Democrats so our fears shift back and forth and this matches our recent experience during the Bush administration we were afraid of Bush Cheney Halliburton Blackwater war for oil and then those things became politically inert assume his Obama won and then it was the birth certificate and Obama killed the kids at Sandy Hook and he blew up the Deepwater Horizon well and he's a socialist and a Muslim and a Satanist and those things don't matter anymore and now it's Trump Russia and Trump is doing this and Trump is doing that so the things that we care about follow changes in relative power and not just the presidency but also Congress do during the two years that Democrats controlled everything 2009 and 2010 Republicans were going crazy with conspiracy theories and as soon as they took back the house a lot of the air was let out of that balloon salmon's think same thing happened in 2006 when the Republicans controlled everything and then lost the house to the Democrats air was led out of that balloon if the Democrats were to win back the house or the Senate most likely some of the conspiracy theorizing is going to go down on their side because they will have gained relative power you also find during major Wars world war one world war two and the Cold War you people are much more concerned about foreign threats than they are during other times so conspiracy theories are really a bellwether of fear what are we afraid of at any time and it seems like the American public is pretty good at putting their fears on things that are actually powerful we were never afraid of Vietnam or Iraq or Afghanistan or Korea we were afraid of Russia and we were afraid of Germany in World War two so let's take this and apply it to voting so in 2012 right before the election I did a poll I asked people do you think that the outcome will be fraudulent and both sides Republicans and Democrats equally said you know equal number said yes after the election Obama wins Democrats when asked do you think there was fraud involved no it was perfect Republicans we were cheated and when you ask what kind of fraud was taking place Republicans think that bribery and fake ID as a fraud that is going on and that makes sense that's why they want this is why they want ID checks during voting oh excuse me for Democrats they think it's suppression and intimidation so both sides are pointing fingers at each other in this matches what they talk about Democrats think that they're that they're people aren't being allowed to vote and Republicans think that people who shouldn't be allowed to vote are being allowed to vote so it's just the fingers again going back at each other if you ask people about more recent elections Republican 37% of Republicans think that Ohio was rigged in 2004 an equal number think that acorn rigged the election for Obama in 2012 the funny thing was acorn didn't exist in 2012 but Republicans believe they did it anyway so so parity between the two beliefs beliefs about fraud just a little bit different in 2016 and the reason is because fraud became an actual issue in the election with the Trump campaign saying yes fraud happens all the time it's going to be completely prevalent and Democrats are going to come out and say no fraud does not happen so you wind up with a little bit more Republicans than Democrats thinking fraud is going to happen in 2016 but afterwards a lot of air gets left out of the Republicans balloon and they don't think that it was fraudulent YouGov did a poll of Democrats a couple weeks after the election they said do you think the Russians hacked the voting machines of course there was no evidence that this had taken place 50% of Democrats said yes that has happened so now it's the Democrats whose beliefs are going up and nobody makes a better example of this some Paul Krugman he's a you know Nobel Nobel Prize winner writes for the New York Times and here's his tweet in 2006 many of the people who throw around terms like loopy conspiracy theories are lazy bullies in 2006 he was on the losing side he was in favor of the conspiracy theories because that was a tool that his side was using and he the establishment who was working against conspiracy theories he didn't like that he thought conspiracy theories were okay but the Democrats take charge and Obama's president then he changes his tune conspiracy theories are supported by a lot of influential people on the right but not on the left we would never believe in conspiracy theories and then Trump wins and then he comes out with the conspiracy theories Putin and Comey worked together to swing the election so depending on where you are you know in terms of relative power that drives your view of conspiracy theories and if you believe in them or not and because conspiracy theories are losers once Trump won this was okay Jill Stein came out and raised eight million dollars in just a few weeks to do a recount with the support of the Clinton campaign they alleged that that some of the voting machines potentially had been hacked in some voting districts particularly in Wisconsin 8 million dollars raised very quickly the same time that's going on he says this I won the electoral college fair and square but I would have won the popular vote if now for those 3 million illegal Mexicans who had voted this didn't work because he was no longer a loser and this got this agitation they said oh my god he's destroying democracy but this sort of flew under the radar and it was okay because they're on the losing side now the irony is that Jill Stein who raised money for the recount is now being accused of being a Putin agent people think that she threw the election brexit you sort of see the exact same thing taking place where you had people on the outside people who didn't like the EU and they said hey you know you better vote in pen because if you vote in pencil they're going to erase your vote and these people were driven by fears that the EU was starting a secret army and that there was secret plans for more integration coming that they didn't want so again we're not the only country that has had conspiracy fears drive some of this so democracy demands the power change hands from time to time and that means everybody gets to play the winner and everybody gets to play the loser so eventually everyone will savor the sweet righteousness of the prosecution before drinking the very very bitter draught of being persecuted conspiracy theories are like an insurance plan we all pay in and then we get to get the payout eventually so what we've seen more recently is what I would like to call conspiracy theory politics you had two candidates that base their campaigns largely on a conspiracy theory Trump if you boil all of his stuff down to one thing all these conspiracy theories it basically comes down to foreign elites basically comes out of the idea that political elites in America have sold out the interests of regular Americans to foreign interests for Bernie Sanders it was that political elites have sold out the interests of regular Americans to economic elites which he called the 1% both of them thinked they thought that everything was rigged Trump thought the elections were going to be rigged Bernie Sanders said that our entire political and economic systems were rigged they both got 40% of their vote the establishments on the other hand aren't very good at conspiracy theorizing it's just not what establishments do but you did see a little bit of conspiracy theorizing coming out some people on the Republican side thought that Trump was a Clinton plant there to screw up the Republican Party so the Clintons could win Hillary Clinton thought that people were attacking her and it was part of the vast right-wing conspiracy coming back to get her again so the question is why did it work for them why were they able to get 40% of their respective parties votes so one thing I'd like to propose is you know take a look at this office nice group of people working in an office now let's say one of them has a bunch of really crazy ideas that they want to they might want to share with others because by sharing their ideas they can engage in collective action but let's say those ideas are a little bit off the mainstream like I don't think a black person should be president you can't really come out and say that because you'd be ostracized from from an environment such as this so you might say something like hey did you hear about that birth certificate thing maybe it's faked who knows I don't know or did you hear about that Pizza Gate thing so you can come off sounding like a kooky conspiracy theorist without having to share something that could get you socially ostracized so it may very well be the fact that not only are people believing in the conspiracy theories but they are signals for some other deeper ideology that's off the beaten path that may not be able to expressed so openly so one way you can one thing you can liken that to is like drugs like street gangs if you want to join a street gang you have to make a serious commitment so here this guy's got his whole face tattooed up and that pretty much means he's in the gang for life he's not gonna switch to another job he's made a pretty strong commitment if we were to join the Mafia now generally what they make you do is shoot somebody first that way they know you're not you're not an FBI agent they also know that you're pretty fairly committed once you're already killing people same thing with radical leftist groups back in the 1970s where they wanted people to join they would invite them in their spouse to share in like sex orgies and once they do that they would know they were fairly committed to the group because once that person does that they can't really transition into that so it's a pretty you know it's a pretty strong thing so to me the conspiracy signal you know may very well mean something that's going on underneath and they're finding this out right now with grexit voters we are the people who believed in Breck is a conspiracy theories also believed that you know we you know it's bad to have women in the workplace gay shouldn't be getting married so there are other you know beliefs that that might be underlying this one thing I like in a2 and I know the movies coming out to my little pony movie but bronies here you have a group of people that are espousing something that comes off very outside it may very well be a marker for other ideas and behaviors that might be that might be strange so you have you have the two candidates Bernie is able to get forty percent but because he's up against one candidate he's not able to win Trump did because the establishment vote on the Republican side was divided twenty ways Trump wins by putting together a coalition of people who were sort of motivated by conspiracy theorizing now the interesting thing is like if you look back at one episode after Trump secures the nomination he comes out that day and says I think Ted Cruz's dad killed JFK and the Washington Post ran an article that said we don't even know how to cover this there was no reason for him to say that it's just loopy and he had note he had no need to do it because he had won so why are you attacking the guy's father part of the reason is as I mentioned earlier conspiracy theorists are less likely to vote but by pushing this conspiracy narrative over and over and over and over again he was able to motivate those people and you see a lot of people casting ballots for the first time for Trump in a lot of these states so it was able to use the conspiracy theorizing to motivate people who otherwise might not have voted now where does that leave us conspiracy theorists are sometimes deft at getting power but power is a greasy pole and keeping together a coalition of conspiracy theorists once you're in power is sort of difficult it's not easy for the most powerful person on the planet to say they're a victim of shadowy forces so the narrative may not work for that long and he may have to rebrand himself so normally I like to end my talks with you know beautiful picture of the world and I'd say something very uplifting to you but you could sort of see the hurricane brewing and it's sort of a strange place to be in you know I don't think that people are believing in conspiracy theories more now than they have in the past what I do think is that they are much more part of our political discourse than they ever were in the past and I think that's a particularly bad thing conspiracy theories are fine there is another part of the ledger but sometimes they can lead to such extreme distrust that they can damage the politics and I think that may very well be where we are right now if I could give you any vice any advice be open-minded and when presented with conspiracy theories try to treat it the same way you would any other belief just don't buy it because it implicates the other side or doesn't implicate yours thank you so much for having me [Applause] you

Channel: Pitzer College

Views: 3,057

Rating: 3.6666667 out of 5

Keywords: Pitzer, Pitzer College

Id: daxl7-PFF3w

Length: 53min 55sec (3235 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 07 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Dukhaville]

To be clear: I dislike the title of this talk - nonetheless, I think there is useful information here.

The speaker starts by clarifying precisely what he means by the term "loser" - which softens the blow in fact.

[u/c0nspiracyaccount]

As a self confessed conspiracy reader this was interesting. It was cool how he brought up the Iran contra scandal and tuskegee. I wonder how many people know about these as before I started reading conspiracy forums I had no clue.

Not finished this yet but going to continue now.