by David Winner
Is it like that first moment when you touch certain parts of yourself as a child and find pleasure in it? Or that first drink, that first cigarette?
Now that I’d determined that the shooting was staged, what other realities could I question? All my life I could have rejected political outcomes that bothered me—Reagan in 1980, Trump in 2016, and both Bushes in between. Cowardly Vice Presidents had certified those results. The Republicans had brought out their dead to vote along with the help of their Ukrainian/Russian/Venezuelan/Cuban allies. They’d fucked with voting machines.
Like the opiate epidemic but maybe even more free ranging, conspiraboids are lighting up in people’s brains all over the world. Ukrainians are really Nazis. Rohingya are recent invaders of Myanmar. Moslems aren’t really Indians. Illegal alien rapists and murderers are descending upon the southern border of the United States.
I want to claim that conspiracy theorists are less knowledgeable, their ignorance of established historical narratives creating greater breeding grounds for fabulated ones, but so many conspiracy theorists are perfectly over-educated.
Early on in the pandemic, before fiction had so thoroughly replaced fact, Angela, my wife, and I found ourselves in conversation with an EMT worker in Millerton, New York, a couple of hours northwest of the city. After telling us agonizing stories of arriving at houses and finding people already dead from Covid, he started to tell us his own ideas about the virus.
This medical professional, a white man, told us that chloroquine could prevent infection and that black people could not get the virus. Flashes of Donald Trump several years later on some leaked phone conversation with Robert Kennedy Jr suggesting that the large size of needles used to inoculate young children were resulting in crippling injuries and multiple deaths.
From the president on down during the pandemic, so many people rejected science in favor of their homegrown medical theories, an overwhelming phenomenon almost its own kind of Jerusalem syndrome. But I think its roots are more personal, individual, and very few of us, certainly not me, are innocent of it.
I won’t drag you, dear readers, down dirty rabbit holes, but most of the times that I’ve lied, at least part of me has convinced myself that I was telling the truth.
See if it’s true for you. Take a deep dive, think about the lies you’ve told. If you can’t come up with many or any, you may be either preternaturally honest or believe your own bullshit.
Our lies solve problems: practical ones, moral ones, political ones. In that sense, they are really not lies but personal conspiracy theories. No one is conspiring against us. We are conspiring against ourselves. Real conspiracies like Tuskegee, exquisitely contrived against black American syphilis sufferers, are also made of lies, lies that take away from our faith in authority and leave us susceptible to other lies, false conspiracies.
In 2020, Donald Trump and his minions capitalized on one of the best uses of conspiraboids, trying to set them off to launch an actual conspiracy, conspiring to steal the election by making his supporters think it had been stolen from them.