How to Deprogram a Conspiracy Theorist: The Megapost

This is a long post. It was written primarily as a series of video scripts and Reddit posts but is collected here for anyone who is trying to understand why their loved one would believe in the most fantastically insane and hateful lies we can imagine.

It’s long in part because it has to answer the question journalists always ask: “Does he really believe it?”

The “he” is usually Trump, and they ask whether he could possibly believe his countless obvious lies. The answer is rightfully vital to the way modern journalism works. If “he” does, he’s delusional, so we can dismiss him. If “he” doesn’t, he’s a liar, so we can call him out.

But the answer is not something that modern journalism can handle, or that many of us want to hear. Journalism can’t, and we don’t want to, because we don’t really have a word for the kind of “belief” that “believing” in conspiracy theories is, and because we want to believe that, if we can just fit Trumpism into its place in the system, it will be automatically processed for us as we progress toward our inevitable future.

That’s what we want to believe, but we’re wrong. To really understand conspiracism, fascism, or Trumpism is to understand that the future is only made through taking risks, making sacrifices, and telling the truth first — or failing to do so.

Of the three essays, the first attempts to answer that question “Does he really believe it?” by explaining what it means to “believe” conspiracy theories.

The second attempts to explain how this kind of belief manifests in a conspiracy theorist’s life, and what you might be able to do to help them.

And the third attempts to explain how it manifests as a mass movement, and the only thing we’ve ever been able to do to stop it.

ESSAY 1: WHAT IT MEANS TO “BELIEVE” CONSPIRACY THEORIES

Lying for “Truth”

During the 2017 special Senate election in Alabama, Republican candidate Roy Moore was being accused of having sexually preyed on underage girls in his hometown.

But, amid the scandal, an unknown man left a voicemail message on the phone of at least one Alabaman. In the call he claimed to be a reporter with the Washington Post, using a stereotypical East Coast Jewish name and accent, asking for women who would be willing to make claims against Moore in exchange for cash. He was suggesting that there was a conspiracy against Moore.

There was no reporter doing this for the Washington Post. It was a total fabrication, but it was meant to be plausible to people who were already suspicious of mainstream media.

In other words, it was a lie, and the antisemitic conspiracy theorist who made the call knew it was a lie. But the question I want to answer is whether he believed it was True.

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To understand conspiracy belief, there’s something you need to know up front: Conspiracy theorists don’t “believe” their theories, not in the way you’re probably using the word. And that’s part of what makes all of this as frustrating and confusing and complicated as it is.

So I have a goal here in this first essay. After watching this video, the next time you hear some completely unhinged, bigoted, authoritarian insanity, you’re going to stop for a second. You’re going to remind yourself that these people don’t really believe what they’re saying, and you’re going to understand what they are doing instead.

_____

If you’re like me, you’ve heard a particular set of biological, neurological, evolutionary explanations for why people fall into paranoid delusions. If you’re even more like me and have lived through the last six years of American life, this probably doesn’t do the job of explaining conspiracy belief to you anymore.

They aren’t wrong. The points about pattern recognition and dopamine levels are all based on good science. It’s just that there’s a lot it’s not explaining, because they leave the social-emotional factors as their last token explanation.

Actually this old xkcd comic is much closer to understanding the reasons. And reason itself is where we need to start on this… very long, complicated journey.

The Enigma of Reason

There’s a book, The Enigma of Reason by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, that I love because it explains everything about people that’s ever confused me all at once. In the middle of trying to figure out why anyone would believe these things, it helped me internalize the fact that human reason is not a logical problem solving mechanism… And it was never meant to be.

Following the book, let’s first take a look at this. It’s a famous optical illusion you may have seen before that exposes a “flaw” in our visual processing. Because, despite looking obviously different, squares A and B are the exact same shade of gray.

Or let’s take this simple logic problem:

If Mary has an essay to write, then she will study late at the library.

If the library stays open, then Mary will study late at the library.

If we only know that Mary has an essay to write tonight, what is the conclusion?

If you’re like most people who were part of Ruth Bern’s 1989 experiment, you would answer “No, Mary will not study late at the library,” or maybe that we don’t know enough to say. But the answer is actually “yes,” she will study late at the library, because the two premises don’t depend on each other.

Logically, it’s exactly the same as this problem:

Premise 1: if a, then c

Premise 2: if b, then c

Minor premise: a

Conclusion: c

Many more people could get that one right, yet most people get it wrong when you just write it as a series of sentences.

We like to treat these things as evidence that there’s something wrong with our brains, and that the people who can figure it out on the first pass are somehow impressive. We should be able to tell when two squares are the same color or parse the meaning of a couple if/then statements, but most of us are terrible at both.

Except that we’re not all clueless idiots, obviously. The only problem here is that these awkward games are judging our ability to do things that our brains were never meant to do.

Your visual processing is not designed to be good at figuring out abstract optical illusions, but it is meant to be good at accounting for light and shadow when figuring out what something looks like. And your capacity for reason was never meant to focus on exactly what is logically relevant within the parameters of a word problem. But it is meant to account for everything someone tells you, and its real-world context, when trying to understand the point they’re making. Getting these things wrong doesn’t mean that we’re stupid. It means our brains are doing the jobs they’re made for.

And the job of human reason is not to be logically correct. It’s to help us collaborate.

Through a bunch of fascinating research, Mercier and Sperber deconstruct the way we imagine human reason works by first breaking down the process of reasoning that we imagine we use…

1. Experience or observe something about the world
2. Think about it really hard, considering all the premises and implications, then
3. Come to a conclusion based on our own best logic

But no one has ever done that, and no one ever will, because instead we…

1. Experience or observe something about the world
2. Come to a snap judgement based on our intuitions, emotions, and past experiences, then
3. Come up with a post-hoc justification for our intuited beliefs

But those justifications aren’t meant to be logical. They’re only meant to justify ourselves to the people in our lives. As long as our “reasoning” convinces the people we care about that we are right and good and worthy of being accepted into the group because of (or in spite of) what we do and believe, human reason has done its job. It’s fulfilling our emotional need for acceptance of what we believe, what we want, and who we are.

You might say that this is what makes us helplessly irrational and believe in ridiculous things and is everything that’s wrong with the world. Fair enough. But this is where the xkcd comic is especially apt, because it’s not a bug, it’s a feature. And it’s a really important one.

Human reason is an essential social mechanism that helps groups of us work together by forming consensus and building trust. And the entire world is defined by how good it is at that.

Everyone who ever built a bridge or designed a rocket ship or led a social movement believed everything they believed through this same process. It’s actually because of this mechanism that we can believe in a lot of things that are true, especially things that are beyond our personal experience. And we get closer to believing in them when we’re incentivized to.

If you have to justify your beliefs to a large group of people with a variety of experiences and intuitions and identities, sound logic is one of your best options for convincing the largest number of them to accept you. In fact, the group is more likely to hold you to that by challenging you with their perspectives. And things like the scientific method, peer review, and good journalistic practices do work, but they don’t work because they’re tools that solitary geniuses use to create knowledge. They work because they’re social norms that enforce standards on our justifications before we can be accepted.

And just think about this: The only way the people who built the bridges and the rocket ships managed to do so was because they convinced other people to trust them, to accept them and their ideas. And the only reason you know anything about the world outside your personal experience is because you trusted someone who told you about it.

That is the first edge of the sword — an amazingly powerful system that can get hundreds or thousands or millions of us to work together on things that seem impossible. But there is a second edge.

The Second Edge of the Sword

If all of that came together for you, you might start to see where conspiracy belief can form in the negative space.

What if the group to which you justify yourself is small and homogenous? What if your instinct is to reject criticism as a personal attack? What if you exclude establishments that enforce standards on justifications? What if your intuition and the thing you need to form a belief about is just too abstract, complex, emotional, and contradictory, because it’s yourself?

Let’s say someone asks you if you think it’s going to rain.

You’ll have your knee-jerk intuitive belief, then you’ll think about how to explain your answer — it’s getting cloudy and windy, it smells like rain, the forecast said it probably would. You just need to convince them that you’re a “reasonable” person given the facts everyone can see for themselves. And they’ll accept your reasoning not because it’s logical, necessarily, but because it fits with their own intuition and experience.

Now let’s say they ask you if you think that your relationship with your partner will last.

The process is the same — you’ll come to an answer and then try to justify it. But there’s much more at stake here than consensus about the weather. With this extremely personal question comes a flood of thoughts and feelings and memories and needs that are complex and conflicting. Discrete empirical facts aren’t going to cut it. The only way to justify your answer to yourself or anyone else is with deeper, greater truths.

Truth and fact. We get that these are two different things we can “believe” in because we English speakers, at least, have two different nouns. We might even call the most profound and overarching truths “Greater Truths” about love, art, God, morality, etc. that help us make sense of the world and our lives. What we don’t have are two different verbs.

Maybe we don’t have those verbs because the process for believing both is the same. The difference is only in the scale of complexity and subjectivity. But, for all of us, the two will mingle. A fact of which we can’t be certain will challenge us in a way that makes us feel insecure, and we’ll have the option of asking Greater Truth to take it all away from us, to override facts and give us justifications for what we want to believe in the face of an uncertain reality.

This is the beginning of Totalitarian Certainty.

Totalitarian Certainty

Whether the phone call in Alabama was real or fake didn’t matter to the antisemitic conspiracy theorist who made it. If he was called out on it, he would probably say it was satire or a joke or rationalize it in any other way he wanted, because what did matter to him was a Greater Truth, to his mind, regardless of the facts: that the Jews secretly in power are conspiring to destroy white Christian male identity. That is the intuitive, emotional belief he wanted to justify to, and be accepted by, Alabaman voters.

The call was a fake, but to its maker it was just as True, with a capital T, as the international Jewish conspiracy he imagined he was fighting against, and it would do its part in justifying his Totalitarian Certainty.

I want to use this phrase for a specific reason, that being the shape of the power dynamic it creates. Pulling from The Dictator’s Handbook, authoritarianism and totalitarianism are all about a vertical hierarchy of power with one man on top making sure everyone below him is doing their part to keep him there. As long as they do, he gives them their position and the power that comes with it. But if any of them undermine his position, he needs to quickly get rid of them and replace them with someone more loyal. It doesn’t much matter what these subordinates are doing otherwise. They could be totally corrupt an incompetent — they could even be sabotaging what the other subordinates are doing. Their number one qualification is always whether or not they help keep the ruler in power. Everything else is secondary.

The “beliefs” of conspiracy theorists work in the exact same way.

At the University of Kent in 2012, social psych researcher, and core member of my crew, Karen Douglas found that “the more participants believed that Princess Diana faked her own death, the more they believed that she was murdered.” The more they “believed that Osama bin Laden was already dead when US special forces raided his compound in Pakistan, the more they believed he is still alive.”

Someone on the QultHeadquarters subReddit posted a perfect example of this. Whoever made these graphics believes that dinosaur bones are actually dragon bones. And they believe that dinosaur bones aren’t real because they’re manufactured in China.

But here’s a more pressing example: Throughout and since 2020, conspiracy theorists have said that Covid is at the same time a nonexistent hoax, a bug no more dangerous than the flu, and a deadly Chinese bioweapon. It didn’t matter to them that these things can’t be true at the same time. But these people aren’t crazy. They’re building up their hierarchy of justifications for an ultimate belief.

At the bottom of the hierarchy are their specific beliefs: Covid is a hoax, Covid is a common flu, Covid is a bioweapon; or that dinosaur bones are really dragon bones, and that dinosaur bones are fake. And we can add another set of beliefs about the 2020 election: that there were millions of fake Biden votes, and that voting machines swapped vote totals. None of them can be true at the same time, yet, if you were to survey conspiracy theorists about which of them they believe, just like Douglas’s researchers found, I’m sure that a lot of them, if not most of them, would believe all of them.

But they don’t believe any of them because any evidence supports them, they believe all of them because they each justify the next belief up on the hierarchy of power. Each specific belief is an individual justification for the belief above them, which helps the believer be accepted by the people to whom they want to justify themselves.

If the Greater Truth of your Totalitarian Certainty is that scientists are trying to undermine religion with evolutionary theory, then dinosaur bones actually being dragon bones confirms that belief, and dinosaur bones being modern fabrications confirms that belief.

If the Greater Truth of your Totalitarian Certainty is that the Democrats stole the election from Trump, then millions of fraudulent votes for Biden confirms that belief, and the vote totals being flipped between Trump and Biden confirms that belief.

And if the Greater Truth of your Totalitarian Certainty is that elites are lying about Covid to control our lives, then Covid being a hoax confirms that belief, Covid being a common flu confirms that belief, and Covid being a bioweapon confirms that belief.

Thus all of them are true, all of them, at the same time, in the same way. Not factually true, but emotionally, intuitively, metaphysically True in a way that gives believers a constant source of justifications that will always be accepted by their group, as long as they can be made to serve that Greater Truth.

As much as conspiracy theorists love to quote George Orwell, this is the mechanism of doublethink. Those who doublethink believe in a single Greater Truth that’s more True to them than facts. So much so that a lie, even one that they know is a lie, told to spread that Truth is more True than any fact can be alone — even a lie that contradicts other lies told for the same Truth. They can always be reconciled by baptism within that Greater Truth, a certainty so powerful that it dispels all doubt and asserts itself as a dictator over our terrifyingly uncertain knowledge of the factual world.

In other words, it’s a Big Lie. Where a regular lie says what is false as fact to manipulate those who act on facts, a Big Lie strides out of the metaphysical, crushing facts underfoot to manipulate those who fear a deep emotional insecurity that they want to escape.

This is why you will never, ever, ever be able to debate a conspiracy theorist out of their beliefs. Even if you completely debunk every detail, all they’ll do is move the goalposts back, further up the hill they plan to die on.

There are a million of these kinds of beliefs and truly endless specific conspiratorial delusions to support them. All of them are arranged in this hierarchy that eventually leads to the very top. The Big Lie at the heart of all extremism: “We” are innocent, “They” are evil.

This is what all conspiracy theorists, paranoid extremists, most truly believe. It is the absolute dictator of their psyche that will brutally destroy or subvert any insubordinate belief. It’s their Totalitarian Certainty. And they believe it because they have to.

Every conspiracy theorist is driven by a deep insecurity that the Big Lie of their Totalitarian Certainty comforts for them. Like being asked if they believe their relationship with their partner will last, something about themselves and their circumstances floods them with conflicting thoughts, feelings, and needs. The need to feel that they’re special, they’re smart, they’re safe, they’re good, that they know what’s going to happen, that they’re entitled to their privilege and wealth, that they deserve to have power over the people they think are their enemies. Shared insecurities like these are what form the homogenous group of people to whom they justify their beliefs, and beyond whom everyone is an enemy.

To lose their Totalitarian Certainty — to acknowledge their contradictions and reckon with their complicity in lies — is to face their insecurity, and they can’t do that. At least not yet.

Why There Is Hope

If you’ve wondered why all of this is so strange and hard and nothing can fix it and everything keeps getting worse, this is why. A special vulnerability to paranoia and conspiracism is baked into the fundamental way we learn and believe and motivate ourselves to work together. It’s why it’s such a powerful political tool, and why all of those paranoid extremists have organized to take over local election boards and get out their vote.

Going back to the xkcd comic one last time, this is why so many people have lost friends and family who are smart and sensible and kind to paranoid extremism. Because conspiracy belief doesn’t happen when someone fails at logic. We’re all failing at logic just as badly as any conspiracy theorist every day. What it’s a failure of is naïve cynicism and emotional immaturity, and often dealing with trauma, in the face of the human condition.

But it’s also why it’s not hopeless, and it points us to things we can do and have done to save society from fascism.

We all have these same kinds of insecurities and we all believe things in the same socially motivated way, but not all of us are wallowing in a fever swamp of hateful paranoia. If you aren’t, it’s because your idea of who counts as “us,” the people to whom you feel you must justify yourself, is bigger and broader. And it’s because you aren’t letting your anxieties compel you to seek a delusion, and a community of the deluded, that will help you escape reality.

It isn’t because you’re special, which is a good thing, because that makes it a path for someone else to get out.

If you choose to, and you can do so safely, you might be able to help someone in your life. Might. But you have to know that most of them will not come back to reality, at least not while the real world is a giant mess of anxious uncertainty and disinformation algorithms.

Still there is something you can do to help yourself, your family, and the world as long as you remember to tell yourself: Conspiracy theorists don’t believe their theories. They believe their fears.

ESSAY 2: HOW TO DEPROGRAM A CONSPIRACY THEORIST

In 20 years, there has only ever been one conspiracy theory that I got my dad to renounce.

It was the summer of 2011 when my dad sat me down and showed me a series of conspiracy rumor mills saying that Barack Obama’s birth certificate was fake. The clincher was that the PDF released by the administration had layers. Like, editing layers, in Photoshop.

There were “layers,” so to speak, which is kind of weird if you don’t know how these things work. My dad didn’t, but I was Editor-in-Chief of my university’s newspaper at the time, so I knew something about Adobe. And I knew the explanation was simple — the birth certificate’s scanner was programmed to identify text and separate it into layers in the image file.

That evening I spent at least two hours grinding out the most satisfyingly savage takedown of a conspiracy theory I’ve ever done. And my dad finally conceded that, okay, maybe the birth certificate is real and Obama was born in the United States… But that didn’t change the fact that the big banks put him in office as a puppet who would bail them out after the 2008 financial crisis.

With that, my dad hollowed my victory into a brittle, crumbling husk.

I had won the debate over whether or not the birth certificate is fake. But I didn’t realize that I had forfeited the debate over whether Obama is a puppet of the banks. Or whether elite institutions are plotting world events to control our lives. Or whether “we” are innocent and “they” are evil.

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Contrasting with part 1, this is going to be more of an advice essay mixed with personal journal asides that appear in the video sprinkled throughout (with details changed to preserve anon/pseudonymity). And I think it can all be helpful as it draws from years of success and failure, starting with my failure in 2011 when I didn’t know something that I am still writing about so I can truly know it myself:

You will never, ever, ever be able to debate someone out of conspiracy theories.

The way people around here say it, “you can’t logic someone out of a belief they didn’t logic themselves into.” Which is true, but stopping there ignores the fact that none of us logic our way into believing anything.

We trust our way into it.

Aside: I’m on the quad here at ISU because, after coming back from being AWOL during the Vietnam War, this is where my dad ended up. I grew up just a few miles away from here, but this isn’t actually where I went to school. This is where my dad went back in the 80s, when he was about my age now, I guess.

It’s Sunday afternoon, so there’s not many students around, but there’s a good chance that the ones who are know something about who my dad is. Because, every year, on September 11, he tries to take his conspiracy theories IRL to “demonstrate” on campus. He comes with a sandwich board and a lawn chair and he just kind of sits and makes himself available to be seen and have pictures taken of him and get into debates with college students.

It’s nothing personal against the school, he actually really values his education even now. Really the problem for him, and I think he’d agree with this, is that institutions of higher education like this are mini societies of trust. Everyone here is learning and creating new knowledge by trusting the people around them and before them. They’re also being skeptical, because everyone here is allowed to challenge beliefs as long as they can meet the community standards for justifying new beliefs. So even agitating for change is part of the system of maintaining trust.

Is it good at it? I mean, not all the time, but it’s still way better at it than anywhere else because that’s the only way that you can have a community of learning. Being a thoughtful and determined student is great, that will do so much for you. But, if you don’t trust the people here, it doesn’t matter if you’re the smartest person in the world. You aren’t going to learn anything.

I’m going to say that again because of how absolutely essential it is to understand: We don’t come to believe anything, true or false, through solitary contemplation. None of us “thinks” alone. We think with and through each other. Because we reason, we decide, and we believe through trust.

Either we trust people to tell us what is true about the world outside our personal experience, or we trust people when they accept or reject our justifications for our beliefs.

This doesn’t mean that we have to believe what everyone around us believes, and it really doesn’t mean that it’s all pointless because we can never know what’s true. It’s just that we have to trust someone if we’re going to believe anything that we can’t personally verify, which is basically everything. And to have any kind of a relationship with someone means, in part, trusting their take on our reasoning — something we’ll come back to.

So, no. The conspiracy theorist didn’t logic their way into their beliefs. But if we want to get through to them, we need to know who they trust, who they distrust, and why.

The Hippie-to-Maga Pipeline

Are you ready for another book? Because this next one is The Cultic Milieu edited by Jeffrey Kaplan and Helene Loow. It’s not as fun as The Enigma of Reason, but it’s another book I love because it helped explain how my dad went from being an anti-war, peace-and-love hippie to being an antisemitic paranoiac.

The authors probably wouldn’t like me saying this, but the “cultic milieu” is basically counterculture, and counterculture is a swirling mass of anything that expresses rejection of the mainstream. Things like…

Tattoos, metal-heads, crystal healing, astrology, Dungeons & Dragons (at least before 2016), all the different kinds of punk, van life, mail-order dietary supplements, gold bugs, cryptocurrency, MLMs, nerdy internet fandoms, stoners, straight-edge, cryptid hunters, flat-earthers, young-earth creationists, quantum woo, witches, sovereign citizens, preppers, millenarians (and I got the word right this time), tent revivals, neopagans, New Atheists, anarchists, communists, ancaps, cults, hippies, and conspiracy theorists.

These all look like extremely different things… because they are, but they tend to attract remarkably similar kinds of people who are drawn to them for a similar reason. They’re people who distrust mainstream ideas about how to look, how to act, and what to believe. So, instead, they form their own countercultures — groups of people who think with and through each other, who trust each other, more than they do the mainstream.

Aside: I was living on the West Coast for a while working for what you might call a countercultural magazine, and I met this guy through a mutual friend. I didn’t spend much time with this guy, but in the time that I did, I found out about everything that he thinks is bull****: schools are bull****, cars are bull****, definitely organized religion is bull****, just, everything is bull****.

Now my friend is a science journalist, so, at some point evolutionary biology came up, and this guy stopped us to say, “evolution is bull****.”

We were like, “Are you a young-earth creationist?” And he said, no, he wasn’t, because religion is bull****, but he had read these blogs by creationists talking about how they were being censored by mainstream academia, and they weren’t able to share their theories at places, well, like this.

So, yes. To him, evolution is bull****. And that is the cultic milieu

See also: Tulsi Gabbard and Kanye West

For the Cultic Milieu itself, distrust of the mainstream is the highest-order belief. Anything that validates that ultimate “truth” is thus True, with a capital T, even if it directly contradicts other beliefs in the milieu.

But that’s not entirely the case for everyone who dabbles in the cultic milieu (which, to be clear, is everyone). If a couple of your highest-order beliefs are that all humans are equal and injustice is wrong, then there is a lot of mainstream bull**** you’re going to reject in favor of countercultural ideas. But there’s also a lot of mainstream ideas and institutions you’re going to accept.

So, how and where you and the conspiracy theorist fit into the Cultic Milieu — what justifies your trust and distrust — is the second key, after Totalitarian Certainty, and a much more personal one for understanding what’s going on and what to do.

Let’s start with you.

Truth and Skepticism

Why should you trust any mainstream news sources?

The conspiracy theorists have a point here. Everyone on CNN or NBC or 60 Minutes could be lying to you about everything and you would never know it.

But I would argue that there are, actually, good reasons to trust mainstream journalists and scientists and scholars to give us at least a decent idea of what’s going on. The main reason being that diverse communities of trust can only exist with communally enforced standards, what you would call “healthy skepticism.”

If one mainstream journalist reports something, it’s almost certainly not a lie, but it’s also probably not worth taking seriously yet. If a couple more report on it, an entire ecosystem of incentives are making sure it’s at least true on the facts. If the first journalist was lying, everyone else is professionally incentivized to call them out, and if the first journalist cares about their reputation, they’re incentivized to report the truth. (If they don’t, then they’re a Fox News primetime host.) But it takes everyone both holding themselves to and enforcing those standards to make this work at all.

This is what it means to be skeptical — not trusting any one person spouting their unaccountable beliefs, but trusting a system of professional expectations, and yes, sometimes profit incentives (especially in the case of cable news), among intensely competitive people playing by a set of rules. You know that it can never be the whole story, and everyone will have bias, but healthy skepticism knows that you can’t use that as an excuse to believe whoever or whatever you want.

Is it a perfect system? Not at all. Are there gaping blind spots? Absolutely, especially where there’s profit. Is it overall the best and most effective system of rational inquiry humanity has yet devised that can always get better? Yes. And, if you don’t trust them, you aren’t going to learn anything.

But a conspiracy theorist does not.

Cynicism and Grievance

It’s always technically possible that all the journalists and scientists and scholars are liars. No one will ever be able to prove that wrong, so anyone could choose to be cynical. They can inject into the uncertainty an excuse to distrust the mainstream, as long as they’re motivated to look for one.

And people often gain that motivation when they feel illegitimately rejected by the mainstream.

That’s why this is also part two of what makes all of this so hard: Everyone has countless opportunities to be and feel rejected, or judged, whether for a good reason or not. They could feel rejected by the mainstream as a truly and brutally marginalized minority… Or they could feel that the legal protection of minority rights and opportunities is the mainstream “rejecting” their majority’s rightful power.

Grievance arises when someone believes the reasons why they’ve been rejected are illegitimate. Were it the other way around, they would feel ashamed.

And I am more convinced every day that there is little with as much power over the human soul as the fear of shame and the high of indignation — the desire to say “it’s not my fault,” which nothing makes easier than to say “it’s theirs.”

The more aggrieved one feels, the less they’re going to trust those they believe are rejecting them, thinking them malicious liars or fools, and the more they’re going to seek someone who validates their feelings. Someone who tells them “we should trust each other, because we are like each other, because we have the same enemy who hates us for who we are.”

“It’s not our fault. It’s theirs.”

“We are innocent. They are evil.”

Welcome to “naïve cynicism,” the dark side of the cultic milieu.

In 2011, my dad trusted me when I rejected the justifications for his new belief. And there have been a few other times like that, mostly in the last year, when I debunked him into doubting the specific beliefs at the bottom of his hierarchy. But all he’s ever done is move the goalposts back, further up the hill he plans to die on, further toward the Big Lie of his Totalitarian Certainty that he trusts others to tell him about.

He trusts them because he has a lifetime of grievance about being abused by his own dad and being thought of as a failure and reflexively hating anyone with authority over him. They tell him that the rejection he has experienced isn’t his fault. Which is kind of true! And that’s what makes it so easy for him to believe that he is innocent, and that he is right to hate the evil ones who rejected him, who judged him.

For the conspiracy theorist in your life, anything could drive them to the same place. They could believe that they’re special and smart, but that the mainstream has denied them what they deserve. They could feel abandoned by an economic system that destroyed their future with debt they had no choice but to take on. They could feel terrified that, if they don’t find the right enemies to hate, God will damn them to hell.

These are all the same ways any paranoid extremist finds the groups to whom they want to justify themselves. It’s the counterculture that justifies their grievance when the mainstream won’t.

Aside: When my dad met with me and the family therapist, I didn’t realize how telling it was that he chose to start with his childhood and going AWOL and everything else that made him distrust authority.

He knew that our conversation wasn’t about evidence or even belief. It was about trauma, really. His feelings of betrayal by people who were supposed to protect him. He understands that his life is full of enemies, and that the way to gain his trust is to hate his enemies along with him.

But he does trust me, at least in that he doesn’t think I’m trying to lie to him about anything, even though I don’t hate his enemies. He’s even told me a few times over the years that he doesn’t actually want me to believe a lot of the things he believes. He wants me to keep believing most of the mainstream things that I do because he thinks that will give me a happier, better life than he’s had.

A part of him knows, I’m so sure of it, that his beliefs are weapons and not the reason that he fights.

But I said at the top that I’d made progress. Nowhere near complete success, and often with plenty of progress unraveled, but still progress. Something has worked.

How to Deprogram a Conspiracy Theorist

Finally, how can you do it? How have I been doing it?

First by remembering that you probably can’t. Then asking yourself if you should. Then resolving to do what it takes until there’s nothing left for you to do.

1. Remember That You Probably Can’t
If you aren’t a close loved one of the conspiracy theorist, you have no ability whatsoever to deprogram them, because you will never get them to trust you.

But even if you are a loved one, all of this is ultimately on the conspiracy theorist. They are the one who has some kind of emotional sickness driving them into these beliefs, and they are the one who can cure themselves. If they refuse to engage, no one else can save them.

And you’re up against a lot — almost certainly too much. A whole world of profit-driven attention-maximizing algorithms are shoveling trash into their brains 16 hours a day, and a global fascist movement is drafting them into an imaginary war of good against evil. You’re just one person, even if you’re the most important person in their life.

So, you might — you might — be able to help. Probably not, and probably not entirely. But you might.

2. Ask Yourself If You Should
Paranoid extremism is dangerous. Even if they don’t intend it, engaging with a conspiracy theorist puts you at risk for basically every kind of abuse, and if a conspiracy theorist is at all abusive, you should not try to help them. You cannot help them. You need to protect yourself from them as much as possible.

Mental/emotional abuse is probably the most common type with constant rants and insults, but physical abuse is also possible. Multiple paranoid extremists have murdered family members over their delusions, and many more have murdered innocent people in mass shootings. Take very seriously any threats of violence or possibility of violence with access to weapons.

Also likely is financial and medical abuse. Conspiracy theorists are every con’s favorite mark, and there are plenty of stories on QAnonCasualties of them cashing out their retirement to buy gold, giving their money to grifters, or spending their savings on prepping supplies. And there are almost as many stories about them poisoning themselves or others, including children, with quack cures. Being financially tied to them or under their care is a constant risk.

If you think you’re in a situation like this, the most important thing to do is to protect yourself and find help. The national domestic abuse hotline (800–799–7233 in the US), as well as friends and family who can give you shelter, is the best resource.

But even if you aren’t in a threatening situation, there’s the question of whether it’s worth it. You have a life to live, and you can’t be responsible for someone else choosing to cling to dangerous delusions, especially when engaging with them will demand so much from you.

In all cases, you should only move forward with boundaries that make things manageable for you. Know what you can and can’t tolerate, let them know what you won’t tolerate, make it clear what will happen if they ignore that boundary (such as cutting contact for a while or “gray rocking”), and follow through if they do.

Of course, you may not have much choice. If you’re here, it’s probably someone very close to you who has been, or will be, a big part of your life for a long time if not forever. A parent, a child, a spouse — probably someone you’ve already taken responsibility for, and someone you don’t want to lose.

But they need to not want to lose you too. If their delusion is to the point that they no longer care about being in your life or you being in theirs, they’re too far gone. You aren’t a close loved one anymore. You can’t get them to trust you, and you have no path to undoing their Totalitarian Certainty.

So in the end, it’s your choice, and it’s a choice you’ll make every day, if you haven’t already.

3. Resolve to Do What It Takes
If you choose to try to help someone out of paranoid extremism, you have to be ready for it. You’re treating someone who is sick with an addiction — a literal addiction with dopamine surges in their brains and everything — and the point of the sickness is that they don’t think they’re sick and don’t want to be helped. As one Redditor put it, you’ll need the patience of Jesus Christ himself.

Though, to be fair, even Jesus started flipping tables in the temple.

Phase 1: “Maybe that’s true, but…”

Everything I’ve done with my dad, everything that you can do with the conspiracist in your life, is contained in one brilliantly genius post on QAnonCasualties that is burned into my brain forever.

“Maybe that’s true, but…”

This is a phrase I have used, reused, remade, and remixed dozens of times talking with my dad for the past year. It’s almost all I’ve done.

It’s the perfect way to condense “jiu jitsu persuasion” into one all-purpose conversational tool, and I’ll try to show you how I use it and what it does for me.

If your conspiracy theorist says… “Bill Gates put a microchip in the vaccine to track everyone!”

You might say…“Maybe that’s true, but do you remember when you were worried about giving grandpa the flu? You knew we had to keep him safe, even if we couldn’t see him for Christmas.”

“Trump is going to be president again and he’s going to forgive everyone’s debt, so I’m not going to pay anymore!”

“Maybe that’s true, but don’t you think people should stick to their commitments? You aren’t someone who waits for another person to take care of things for you.”

“Democrats are trafficking children to drink their blood!”

“Maybe that’s true, but if you really want to help children, church has a lot of ways to volunteer for local kids’ charities.”

“The January 6 hearings are lying about everything to put Trump in jail!”

“Maybe that’s true, but can we go to a movie or play a game or something so we don’t have to keep thinking about this? It’s not worth your time.”

And when my dad said at our family therapy session…“A global Jewish communist plot is taking over America!”

I said… “Maybe that’s true, but I grew up with a dad who taught me that everyone is equal in dignity and moral worth. There’s a lot of ways I’m like that dad, both because I didn’t have a choice and because I wanted to be. But your website is taking that dad away from me.”

“Maybe that’s true, but” offers a non-confrontational way to end a conversation’s current course and empower yourself to turn the conversation toward where you need it to go.

And the place you need to go is to offer alternative solutions, whether big or small, for satisfying their emotional needs — that is, to satisfy their sense of what makes them smart, special, righteous, safe, powerful, accepted by a group they trust. Remember that we all have these kinds of needs, but we don’t all rely on destructive delusions to meet them. They don’t have to either.

This phrase, and every other way you can paraphrase it or employ it outside of conversation, is the tool that can achieve the most important things you need to do when deprogramming a conspiracy theorist:

1. It doesn’t start an argument, and it hopefully ends one, because at no point in the process of deprogramming a conspiracy theorist should you argue with them. Remind yourself here that they don’t believe their conspiracy theories as logical, rationally consistent beliefs. They’re a security blanket, and arguing will only backfire as an attack that makes them feel more insecure.

2. It keeps a line of communication open. If the conspiracy theorist doesn’t have you and others like you trying to engage with them in a positive, constructive way, all they will have is the people who feed their paranoia. You need to try to be there for them, always accepting them as much as you can manage while others rightfully reject them, and this phrase gives you a way to make conversations with them more bearable and maybe even helpful.

3. It doesn’t judge or reject them. Where telling them they’re wrong or arguing with them just makes them dig in to fight back, giving them a non-committal concession helps defuse their instinct to resist rejection, to resist shame. It can be hard to feel like you’re giving them ground on important truths, but, again, remember that they don’t really “believe” what they’re saying anyway.

4. It ignores the specific theories — the lower-order justifications for the conspiracy theorist’s Totalitarian Certainty. These are just a frustrating distraction that the conspiracy theorist doesn’t even consistently believe and will constantly contradict anyway. You should just ignore them and spend the time that you would be arguing on more constructive conversation.

5. It moves the goalposts. If you ever manage to debate a conspiracist into conceding a specific theory, all they’ll do is move the goalposts back toward their Totalitarian Certainty.

So just do it for them. Save everyone’s time by making the conversation about what it should be about anyway.

Again, this is not a way to attack them. You’re not doing this to call them out for how terrible they are or to dismiss their beliefs as emotional delusions. The point is always to offer them something else. You’re softening them up for a more productive way to meet their need, even if that way is just a distraction, like Wordle.

This technique goes beyond conversation, though, and being creative about how to constantly re-apply it can keep it going a long way. For example, if your conspiracist is old, doesn’t really understand technology, and is just kind of passively being fed that high of indignation from Steve Bannon’s podcast or Fox News or Facebook, you should try to cut off their access to it. Those are all shameless grifting drug pushers that artificially manufacture insecure emotional needs (mostly fearful bigotry) in our family and friends, so blocking websites, canceling subscriptions, and replacing them with better sources and interests can do wonders. I helped make a book about that, actually.

It’s about rebuilding a relationship of trust, and that is at least 90% of the struggle. The hard part is understanding why and how it works. That’s why I’ve now spent about 10,000 words on it in the last two essays alone. But I think it’s worth it, because, beyond the patience of Jesus Christ himself, you need a finely honed intuition to know what comes after the “but.”

Every person, every relationship, every conversation is going to be different, and each difference will be subtle. The only way to have a chance at getting through to them is to deeply understand why they “believe” what they do, why they trust who they do, and to carefully tailor each “maybe that’s true, but” to draw them closer to something else and better.

Phase 2: When/If They Start to Come Back

If it works… Again, it probably won’t, but, if it does, you’ll be able to tell not necessarily because they say that they no longer believe the conspiracy theories. Saying that out loud, or even admitting it to themselves, would cause shame — the fear of which is the whole problem. Instead, they will probably be more like Ellen.

Ellen Cushing was a teenage conspiracy theorist. Now she writes and edits about conspiracy theories for The Atlantic.

The story of how she “got out,” so to speak, isn’t really a story, though. It has a beginning, when a high school teacher told her that the Illuminati secretly ruled the world, but her college years are hardly a middle, and the end happened among everything else without her even noticing. She didn’t “get out” of it, she grew out of it.

As for why, I didn’t expect to find an honest-to-god study about this, but Karen Douglass came through for me again with a study published last year suggesting that 14 years old is the prime age for adopting conspiracy beliefs. Which, of course it would be. Who on earth is more insecure about being judged than a 14 year old?

Ellen herself was an angsty teen who wanted to have special knowledge about the world that made her interesting. She wore conspiracism as an identity that fulfilled that emotional need, like she might have done with goth makeup or a grunge collection, and she left it behind in adulthood like she might have done the others.

There was never an “a-ha!” moment of clarity. There wasn’t even a conscious decision. She just thought and talked about the conspiracy theories less and less, and they seemed less believable to her, until she stopped thinking about them, or believing in them, at all.

What she, and every recovered conspiracy theorist, was really doing was feeling less. She was feeling her angsty teenaged emotional need less as she matured, and I think that is literally the same thing as believing in conspiracy theories less.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t dramatic moments of realization for those who are coming out of conspiracy belief, but, when there are, it’s probably paired with an equally dramatic emotional reckoning.

Your conspiracy theorist might start to actively doubt conspiracy beliefs as they’re deprogrammed. It’ll be a miracle if it happens, but if it does, you need to encourage it, lavishly, without even a hint of condescension or judgement.

This is when you start gently debunking the conspiracy theories — not when they insist that they’re true but when they start to question the theories themselves. Debunking, in this case, is not an argument you make against them to prove them wrong but an argument you give them when they start to want it.

In fact, probably the best way to debunk them is to let them do it themselves through the Socratic Method. When they start to become less anxious, angry, and obsessive around you, they will be more receptive to gentle questioning of their beliefs. Janessa Goldbeck tweeted a good example of this, and you can use questions like this to express genuine, non-confrontational curiosity to someone who is hopefully ready to indulge it.

You need to help them feel the same emotional satisfaction they were seeking in the delusions but through their doubts instead. They need an invitation to be accepted back into the community of trust, of healthy skepticism, that is bigger and broader than the small community of cynical grievance.

A part of that invitation might be finding professional help for them. A good therapist who has experience deprogramming psychological addictions is a great resource for working out their insecurities and channeling them toward a better solution. It was vital for my own dad, and I think one of our biggest obstacles is that I haven’t been able to convince him to keep seeing the therapist we met.

If they’re coming back, they will probably relapse at some point. They’re going to compulsively crave the high of indignation that the conspiracy theories give them, and there’s plenty of things that will push them off the wagon. Especially anything that excites their insecurities. When that happens, it doesn’t mean it’s over. If they managed to get part of the way back before, they can do it again. You just need patience.

Do they deserve any of this? No. They’ve probably said and done terrible things that people should judge them for, and they aren’t owed any patience or care.

But none of this is about what anyone deserves. No one living or dead has ever gotten what they deserve. It’s just the only way you can have them back. You need to help them find what they need. And that’s probably you.

Aside: While I was writing this essay, I got an email from my dad about anti-vaccine stuff, you know. I should have better about sticking to my own advice, but things have been kind of not great with him for the past couple weeks, so I argued, a bit, in the response, even though I knew it was pointless. But then he actually changed the subject himself. He told me that he had tried playing the violin again. His parents made him learn how to play the violin as a kid, and he told me how much he hated. Like, his violin was stained with tears. Really sad stuff. But it did end up being one of his most valuable skill.

The thing I like telling people most about my dad is that he actually used to be a professional rock-country fiddle player. He even toured across the country once, but it wasn’t very well publicized and the band was kind of a disappointment, so that was basically like a ceiling on how big he would get. He probably hadn’t played in public for, like, at least five years, probably more than that, and he told me that he had gone to campustown to just play on a street corner to see what happened. He made over $50 in tips, so I think he’s still got it.

And he said in the email, “I’m working on reviving my playing. I think it’ll be good for my soul.”

So I wrote back saying, “I remember how many people would come up to you at the grocery store or something to say how much they loved your playing. It wasn’t just being good at the violin. It was being good at music. There’s something in us worth cultivating, so, you should totally do that.”

I hope so.

ESSAY 3: WHY CONSPIRACY THEORISTS LOVE AUTHORITARIANS

Aside: I’m editing this last video here, but I wanted to show you something I just got that kind of freaked me out.

This [holds up a fake newspaper] isn’t our local newspaper. It looks like one, it even has the county’s name in the title, but I’ve never seen it before, because I don’t think it existed before this midterm season.

What this is is a propaganda pamphlet. It’s intentionally misrepresenting policies to say that Democrats will release dangerous criminals (it’s just plastered with mugshots of black men) and groom our children with sex education and trans rights.

Where did this come from? I do not know, but it can’t be local. All the actual stories sound like copy-pasted right-wing blog posts, and everything that’s actually local looks like it’s just publicly available recycled data. Like, the back is literally just a page full of former high school athletes’ photos and details for no reason at all.

I didn’t want this garbage, and there aren’t any ads, so someone, who isn’t disclosed by the pamphlet, is footing the bill to send me this. It took some actual local journalism from an NPR station to explain what was going on with a whole regional network of these, which, of course it was a Republican political action committee — the “People Who Play by the Rules PAC.”

I’m assuming the name is ironic since it got $40 million dollars from an election denier this year, which means insanely rich paranoid extremist fascists are dumping their unlimited money into spreading unaccountable lies to at least hundreds of thousands of people. What’s new.

Maybe the idea of billionaire-funded propaganda would have frightened me more a few years ago, but this is an old trick that’s failed before. Because this is lifted straight out of the last era in which democracy crushed the fascist movement in America for a generation.

In 1939, the most popular radio personality in the United States by far, reaching tens of millions of Americans every week, was a priest. Father Charles Coughlin plagiarized Nazi propaganda for his newsletter, told his listeners that Jews deserved to be terrorized in German ghettos, and helped inspire a nation-wide movement of armed Christian nationalists who began a violent campaign to overthrow the government and create a fascist state in America… all because of conspiracy theories.

The story of the Coughlin-inspired insurrectionists is insane and horrifying, and it’s another failure of our schools that I had no idea until we got two different podcasts about it this year (Radioactive and Ultra). If you want to peek into the abyss of how bad things were back then and how bad they might be now, listen to those. And if you want to know why it is that conspiracy theorists, who are supposed to be fighting against evil cabals of dictators, come to love corrupt, oppressive autocrats, here’s one of my hottest takes:

Not all conspiracy theorists are fascists… yet… But sooner or later, they have to go there. And a mortally dangerous number of Americans already are.

The Politics of Fascism

Let’s say you’re someone who believes that Tom Hanks eats babies.

(As we know now, you don’t literally believe that, because you ultimately believe that you, and the people who you trust to validate your grievances, are innocent and your enemies are evil. Tom Hanks eating babies helps confirm that belief, so you “believe” it when it’s convenient.)

What are you going to do about that?

It is your right as an American to call your representatives and demonstrate publicly demanding that Tom Hanks be tried and executed.

The problem for you, in this case, is that Tom Hanks is not a child-eating demon cannibal, actually. There’s no evidence of a crime that would make a prosecutor launch an investigation, and there is no court that would hear a case charging Tom Hanks with infanticidal cannibalism. The legal system has standards of healthy skepticism that all the prosecutors and judges and lawyers are working to maintain. There’s lots of ways they fail those standards all the time, but they aren’t going to be compromised anywhere near this badly, especially for your sake.

So, what are you going to do about that?

You could just leave it at that and stew in the fact that Tom gets to be a beloved movie star while he secretly indulges in satanic orgies. Or you could vote on it. If a candidate promises that they will do everything in their power to make sure Tom Hanks is put on trial for his crimes against humanity, they’ve probably earned your vote.

But, if they get elected, they’ll have the same problem that you had. They can’t make the justice system go after Tom Hanks without evidence. So there’s only two options left: state violence or street violence. Either the conspiracist politician has to somehow force the system to go after your political enemies, or you have to take matters into your own hands.

Conspiracists tell themselves that this is “politics.” That’s what my dad calls it all the time. He doesn’t think that Tom Hanks eats babies, but he does think that all of his theories about secret communist revolutions and plots to depopulate the world and declare martial law are “politics.”

To be clear, this is not politics. This is not a discussion about how we’re going to live together. If it is, then what are his policy positions? What does he think our tax rates should be? How should industries and unions be regulated? Should we spend more or less on infrastructure? Should weed be legal? What does he want the government to do?

His conspiracy theories don’t answer any of those questions, except the last one.

The politics of fascism begins with defining enemies — saying that “they” are evil — which is the second half of what the conspiracy theorist’s Totalitarian Certainty is all about. That’s the easy part. But fascism also says the first half, that “we” are innocent.

This book is The Road to Unfreedom by Timothy Snyder. It’s the best one I’ve recommended so far, and, even though Snyder isn’t very interested in conspiracy theories specifically, he knows more than almost anyone about fascism. Or what he calls “the politics of eternity.”

It’s “eternal” in that it’s an ideology that says nothing changes, there are no alternatives. All we can learn is what we already knew and all we can become is what we already were. And what we were is innocent.

There was a mythical past when things were the way they’re supposed to be until an evil enemy upended everything, and, if we can just destroy the enemy, things will go back to that state of Edenic innocence forever.

The problem is that you can’t destroy that enemy. Especially if it doesn’t exist. But even if it does, you’ll never destroy it once and for all. But even if you do, that won’t bring back a past that never was.

Thus fascism’s essentially innocent community of “us” is eternally at war for its survival against an essentially evil “them.” It needs to always be destroying enemies, always believing its innocence gives it the right to do so, until it eventually has to declare war on reality itself.

The conspiracy theorist is all about that, and the deeper they go, the closer they come to outright fascism, because, I would say, conspiracism is fascism. Not that it’s like fascism or that it’s a part of fascism, but that it is fascism.

Conspiracism Is Fascism

Aside: Case in point, the Nazis were the worst conspiracy theorists in history. Their entire worldview that justified everything they did was the belief that, for thousands of years, the Jews had been undermining the natural hierarchy of races so that they could secretly rule the world from the shadows.

To the Nazis, any belief that taught equality and compassion among humanity was part of the plan. Christianity, Buddhism, Democracy, Communism — all of it was supposed to be a Jewish scheme to conquer the master race by bringing them down to everyone else’s level.

They told themselves, and still tell themselves, that no one actually believes in equality or harmony or anything and that anyone who says they do is lying on behalf of the eternal Jewish plot for world domination. That lets them believe that their movement is actually supposed to free the world of Jewish control by restoring the rightful hierarchy of races, with them on top and all their enemies destroyed.

So when conspiracy theorists start talking about “cultural marxism” or “judeo-bolshevism” or when they accuse the more liberal billionaire business moguls of being communists, this is where it comes from. They’re motivated to believe that any basically decent person is a liar, and they’re really the good ones because they understand that the world is meant to be dominated by a brutal racial hierarchy.

Timothy Snyder is great. He’s been one of my biggest influences for the past few years, but I think his points here come across best when you mix him with Vaclav Havel.

And, I’m not totally sure he’s trying to say this, but when I read Havel’s essays alongside Snyder, I pick up something that I personally find essential as an explanation for the fascist politics of conspiracists.

Straightforwardly, fascism is a class of totalitarian ideology. It tries to consume every aspect of our lives with uncompromising beliefs that resist reality. But I think Havel might be trying to say that totalitarianism also absolves us of the need to make moral demands of ourselves. It makes us innocent, accepted by our group as right and good for what we believe, in spite of anything we’ve done or might do. It offers that we give up our morality in exchange for Totalitarian Certainty — the absolute belief in what makes us eternally innocent, and anything and everything that will validate that belief even more.

Fascism says that, as long as you keep destroying the enemies you hate, you are blameless no matter what you do. The only “moral” demand that matters to fascism is conveniently what the fascist wanted to do all along.

But this also includes the Soviet Union’s totalitarian communism. It said that the state would inevitably lead the workers of the world through each phase of history until they reached the perfect society. All the people needed to do was what the party leaders said, regardless of what it was, and they would be absolved.

And it’s the free market capitalist ideology of movement conservatism. It has been telling us for decades that “greed is good.” All anyone has to do is to make as much money as they want and everything will turn out great. The wealth will trickle down, absolving you of whatever you did or might do to get rich.

I think Havel, and TS Elliot, would agree that those are all totalitarian ideologies because they’re utopian. They believe they can create the perfect world where people, frankly, don’t have to be good anymore.

All of these are expressions of Snyder’s “politics of inevitability” and “politics of eternity” — the two edges of the sword that destroys anything else that might make moral demands that cause us shame.

Fascism destroys alternatives by promising an eternal utopia, while communism and capitalism destroy alternatives by promising an inevitable utopia. But, here in a post-2020 world, we can see how the politics of inevitability become the politics of eternity when the inevitable fails to happen.

In the end, they have no choice but to demand that all of eternity be filled with the will-to-power of their essential innocence so that they need not fear shame nor weakness before their enemies ever again.

That’s what they want the government to do.

The Illusion of Evil Genius

If that sounds terrifying to you, good.

This is why a movement of American Christian nationalists blew up factories in 1940. This is why we’re seeing the beginnings of another violent insurgency of far-right extremists who want to end democracy.

And it’s why, if we’re going to get through this, we need to re-learn to take deadly seriously the politics of fascism, and of democracy.

Aside: Back in 1940 when the Christian Front and other groups like them were terrorizing America, getting law enforcement to act was a lift, but sometimes they did. The FBI charged a group of mostly Christian Front members with stockpiling weapons and plotting to overthrow the government.

They were all from Brooklyn, and when these “Brooklyn Boys” went to trial, they had the public at their back. Despite being obviously guilty, the jury let most of them off, the rest got off with a mistrial, and New York journalists described them as being zealous but harmless. They were just some “boys” who had learned their lesson. We didn’t need to do anything else about them because they, the fascists, were part of us.

This is why, even after we all saw a violent insurrection attempt to overthrow democracy live on TV, it feels like we still have to beg people to take the threat seriously. It’s just a fact that a critical mass of Americans right now will see a crowd of white people using patriotic, Christian symbols as a group of “boys,” essentially innocent boys, who are understandably acting out against a system most of them don’t trust anyway. In any case, they’ve learned their lesson, so everything must be fine now.

There’s a now-infamous New York Times/Sienna College poll saying that 71 percent of American voters believe democracy is at risk, but only 7 percent thought that was the most important issue in the 2022 midterms. There was quite a bit of shock and despair over this in the liberal world, which I totally get, but the results are about what I would expect.

We talk about it like the fascist movement has some kind of evil genius superpower to sway the masses, but it doesn’t. It’s just the same schtick that it’s always been. What makes it seem so daunting is that our own American totalitarian ideology of capitalism has told us that political fates are inevitable. We can’t do anything about it. Tax cuts and the global market tragically failed in their prophesied quest to create a democratic free world, so now we have to plunge into darkness. Sorry. Greed failed to absolve us, so now Wrath will.

But nothing is inevitable, and everything is a matter of what all of us do. There was a violent mass movement in the late 30s and 1940 to turn this country into a fascist state both among the people and within congress. It got about as bad as things are right now, if not worse, and it failed.

It failed in part because the politics of inevitability and of eternity are, just, lazy politics. The point of both is to give people the easy way out that doesn’t actually work.

This gives it the illusion of evil genius, because the politics of democracy can’t do that. We can’t beat the fascists at that game, because we know that the only way to do this is the hard way. Not the impossible way, by any means, but the only way anything good and lasting has ever been made.

If the politics of fascism begins with defining enemies and ends with waging war on reality, the politics of democracy begins with defining problems, and it continues with making moral demands of ourselves. That doesn’t mean judging people — that’s useless — it’s just taking responsibility for those problems and persuading others to as well. And the politics of democracy only ends when it gives up and decides to find an enemy instead.

But here’s where democracy has a huge leg up: Problems exist, and fascism is wrong about everything. Enemies can’t be destroyed, but problems can be solved. You are surrounded by a billion solved problems that were literally unimaginably impossible to the vast majority of humans who have ever lived. And the only way any of them were solved was with persuasion and trust — democracy, big and small. We solved them by demanding something of ourselves and convincing others to do the same — by being good.

I’m going to give us on the left a little tough love here when I say that… we’ve had a lot of issues with trying to destroy enemies instead of solving problems too. It’s totally understandable, I am absolutely guilty of that, but it’s why we always feel like we’re losing even when we win. It’s so easy to play the fascist’s game, but it’s their game. It’s impossible to beat them at it.

So don’t play their game. They’re in our house. Make them play our game.

The Politics of Democracy

What are they going to do about inflation? What are they going to do about opioid addiction? What are they going to do about unaffordable healthcare, childcare, housing, and education? What are they going to do about immigration policy? What are they going to do about crime? What are they going to do about police accountability? What are they going to do about women’s health and lives being threatened by abortion bans? What are they going to do about gun violence? What are they going to do about layoffs during a pandemic rebound recession? What do they want the government to do? But we already know that answer.

Aside: This is actually one of the most effective “maybe that’s true, but…” answers I give my dad. “Maybe that’s true, but how is putting that person in jail going to fix this problem?”

And this is why Michigan senator McMorrow blew up the way she did. She did this! She called out the destruction of enemies as petty, ineffectual toxicity that didn’t solve anything.

Don’t look for enemies to destroy. Don’t indulge in that cynical grievance. The fascists will always beat you to it, and even if they don’t, they’ll just use your win to rally even more people against you. Because trying to destroy enemies is the same thing as arguing with a conspiracy theorist about their beliefs. It’s impossible and will only make things worse.

So you should do the same thing to both. Dismiss it as pointless. Instead, make the conversation about what it should be about anyway. Make it about the problems that the fascists can’t fix. And take them seriously. Be creative and practical and assertive with ideas about how to solve them.

I guarantee you that every problem and its solutions are extremely interesting to someone who has to deal with it in their real life, and as soon as you offer them a new, creative solution, the politics of fascism will vanish from their minds like it was never there, at least in that conversation.

I know this can work, for a fact, because I’ve reported on local politics in rural America. I know there’s a perception nowadays that it’s just crazy people shouting at school board meetings, but much more often it’s the most low-key inspiring example of people who have no choice but to solve problems, so they have no choice but the politics of democracy.

Not too long ago there was a question of solar panel policy that came up to a county board when a far-right group pressured them to effectively ban all new solar panel projects. They blasted everything you’d expect to this 100% MAGA Republican county board. But then they heard counter arguments from environmental groups and solar industry people explaining that, if solar panel construction could continue with reasonable restrictions, it could bring more high-paying maintenance jobs to the area and lower people’s electricity bills. They had statistics and logical arguments, but, by far more important, they understood the board members’ experience and perspective. They justified themselves as being worthy of acceptance at that meeting, because they cared about the county’s real problems.

The board listened, and afterwards I went up to the oldest and whitest of the old, white members to find out what he thought. And he, along with most of the others there, thought that the pro-solar side made sense. He’d be alright with a few restrictions to keep things safe and pretty, but there was no sense in stifling economic growth that might also help phase out an ugly coal power plant. It was almost indistinguishable from talking to a Democrat.

If you think that the fascists have some kind of secret superpower that we can’t understand, this is our superpower that the fascists can’t understand.

Just remember that problems are real, even the ones we might want to ignore or disagree about. Don’t be afraid of them or dismiss them, because, if we’re debating about how to fix problems, we’re winning. No matter what, they’re our strength, because the fascists can’t beat us at it, they can’t be a part of that conversation. They can’t even make the trains run on time. So make them play our game.

To be absolutely clear, I am not saying that people who are violent, seditious, or corrupt criminals shouldn’t be held accountable, or that we shouldn’t viciously criticize influential fascists who manipulate people with Big Lies. Both of those things need to happen for the sake of justice and persuading people toward truth.

But putting Trump on trial is like fact-checking him. It’s absolutely necessary, but it’s triage. If you’re fact-checking the lie, you’ve already lost that round, and all the system can do is damage control. It’s all it can ever do because democratic systems have only ever been communities of persuasion and trust, without which fact checking or debunking is worse than useless.

Convicting Trump or pushing Tucker off the air, as much as they deserve it, won’t save America. You can’t just fact check the lies. You need to say the truth first, which means believing we can solve problems because, of course we can. It’s objectively, ludicrously wrong to think we can’t. It just requires the very, very hard, but not impossible, work of persuasion and trust.

So, how did the anti-fascists beat the fascist movement of the 30s and 1940? They did this. They published their own local newspapers, they organized groups to demonstrate and volunteer and vote. And some of them took down rings of fascist insurgents by infiltrating them and reporting them to the feds. (Which is pretty badass, though I can’t recommend that for your safety.) Guys, for real, we beat them before. We can do it again.

To that end, I am currently trying to figure out how to safely create in-person support groups for people who have lost relationships to paranoid extremism. As far as I can tell, it’s something that doesn’t exist but really should, because we need every kind of organization and support in physical space that we can make to persuade and build trust.

How am I going to do it? I’m not totally sure yet. Probably starting small and definitely not alone, because that’s how everything works in the grassroots. If you think you can do something like that too, you need to demand that of yourself, you need to persuade others to demand it of themselves too, and you need to help each other do it.

It doesn’t mean you need to devote your life to it. You have a ton of other extremely important things to care about. But if everyone just does a little bit to fix problems, we can expose fascism as the lazy, vile, cynical grift that it is, and we can save democracy.