“Sail (Far) Away: At Sea with America’s Largest Floating Gathering of Conspiracy Theorists”
“Most notably, there was Andrew Wakefield, the British gastroenterologist who authored the now-infamous 1998 study that suggested there might be a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. Jenny McCarthy was breathed into being because of Andrew Wakefield.
The wider world hasn’t been kind to Wakefield, who lost his medical license in 2010 and is widely described as a one-man public health disaster. Here, though, he was treated as a battle-scarred hero. The room hung on his every word.
“One in two children will have autism by 2032,” he told us, to horrified gasps. “We are facing dark times. The government and the pharmaceutical industry own your bodies and the bodies of your children.”
“There are no [vaccine] exemptions anymore,” Sean David Morton piped in. “Not even if you’re Jewish. But I think Obama made an exception for Muslims.” He switched into what may have been an impression of someone with an Arabic accent: “Ay yi yi!”…
Wakefield’s belief in his own theories has never wavered… Compared to many of the presenters, Wakefield was quite coherent, with a thesis that hung together in a logical way, at least on the surface. It was easy to see why he’s a star in the anti-vaccine world.
The question was why he was delivering a passionate defense of his life’s work not to the medical establishment, but to an audience mainly composed of retirees, in a dining room, on a boat, in the middle of the sea…
The political scientists Eric Oliver and Thomas Wood, who authored the study, argue that conspiracy theories are, at their core, an attempt to deal with emotional distress, the kind caused by a shocking or inexplicable event: a vicious new drug coming out of nowhere, planes demolishing the World Trade Center, the president shot dead on a sunny day, riding through the streets of Dallas. Conspiracy theories provide a soothing order and, with it, reassurance.
But there’s also a reason why Americans are particularly prone to believing in conspiracy theories: In our case, quite a lot of outlandish things turn out to be true. The CIA really did conduct serious research into whether it could use mind control on its enemies, a program known as MKULTRA; it really did try to assassinate Fidel Castro through an increasingly absurd series of weaponized devices (exploding cigar, booby-trapped seashell, ballpoint pen laced with poison). The U.S. Army really did try to use elements of the “human potential” movement to try and develop “psychic spies,” known as the Stargate Project. The FBI really did run the COINTELPRO program, a series of covert operations designed to undermine and destroy political organizations from within”
