4. the Gathering Storm
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You Are Here 4. The Gathering Storm Whitney Phillips, Ryan M. Milner Published on: Apr 28, 2020 License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0) You Are Here 4. The Gathering Storm Across the southeastern United States and the Caribbean isles, monsters rise up from the sea. As summer creeps into fall, we wait, warily, for the deluge these monsters will bring. We give them proper names—Hugo, Andrew, Katrina, Maria—and chart their paths as they spin toward our homes, lashing us with rain, blasting us with winds, and raising the sea itself to our front doors. We reverse our highways and evacuate our cities as mayors and governors and people on the news chronicle the damage. We’re afraid of these monsters, yet we keep making them stronger. We’re warming our oceans, so when the monsters form off the coast, they have that much more energy to grow that much larger and stay that much longer. We’re filling in marshes for condos and laundromats, so when the monsters reach land, their natural barriers are gone. What they have instead is a playground, extra blocks to flood, extra buildings to smash. We furrow our brows and batten our hatches as these monsters, these menacing blobs on the radar, lumber toward our shores in greater numbers each year, giving us more chances to look back and say, “Now that was a big one.” Yet “one” isn’t quite right. Hurricanes might be big, but they aren’t really one thing. They are, instead, the sum of many parts. They’re the temperature of the water. They’re the descending and ascending air. They’re the spin of the earth’s axis. They’re how all these things interact. As their causes aren’t singular, neither are their effects. If the winds miss you, the storm surge might not. If you dodge the storm surge, you still have to worry about flooding rivers. Exactly what happens, exactly what’s destroyed, is the result, of course, of the hurricane itself. But it’s also the result of a whole host of other less obvious factors, like coastal development, population density, and details like whether metric tons of manure from your friendly neighborhood hog farm spill out into the tributary. No matter how singular and self-contained the angry red blob looks on the radar screen, hurricanes are not singular and they’re certainly not self-contained. They’re a process, more verb than noun. That people still refer to hurricanes as singular, self-contained things makes perfect sense. Singular, self-contained things are the things you can see. Singular, self- contained things are the things you can evacuate from. It’s simply easier to warn people about nouns, not verbs. Even so, locking a hurricane into singularity and self- containment, as if the hurricane begins and ends with the angry red radar blob, undercuts the ability to tell more holistic, more revealing, and more instructive stories about what the storm is, where it came from, and how we should respond. 2 You Are Here 4. The Gathering Storm By actively verbing the nouns being studied, hurricane analysis tells exactly these kinds of stories.1 This approach is especially helpful when trying to make sense of conspiracy theories, which number among the most menacing storms on the internet. Because they loom so large, have traveled so far, and have lingered so long after making landfall, this chapter focuses on Deep State conspiracy theories: the reactionary pro-Trump narratives purporting that Democrats are, among other horrors, engaged in a secret plot to destroy the Trump administration from within. Prominent Deep State theories include Pizzagate, which maintains that Hillary Clinton ran a satanic child-sex-trafficking ring out of the back of a Washington, DC, pizza shop, as well as the Seth Rich assassination theory, which asserts that a Democratic National Committee staffer was killed for attempting to expose the shadow government’s schemes. One Deep State theory, however, towers above all the rest. Launched by a self-proclaimed whistleblower within the Trump administration known as Q, the QAnon conspiracy theory claims that Trump and his allies are quietly planning a counteroffensive against the globalists, Satanists, and child molesters embedded within the government. Each of these theories emerged as a storm unto itself. Over time, however, they began to replicate a rare meteorological phenomenon known as the Fujiwhara effect, in which multiple storms churning in the same region impact each other. When these storms are equivalent in size and strength, one storm will alter the course of another. When one of the storms is much stronger, it will lasso the smaller storm into its orbit. The latter is what happened with Deep State theories. Pizzagate and the Seth Rich assassination theory, both destructive in their own right, were ultimately absorbed by QAnon, creating a Deep State bomb cyclone so enormous and all-encompassing that it roared to the center of Donald Trump’s impeachment. To even greater and more deadly effect, Deep State theories whipped up the winds around another kind of storm altogether: the COVID-19 pandemic, which many in the MAGA orbit denied as another media hoax until the gale was bearing down on their own homes. To explain how Fujiwhara-fueled hurricanes engulfed US politics, it’s not enough to chronicle when each storm emerged. Nor is it enough to lay out their conspiratorial claims and debunk them one by one. To understand Deep State superstorms, we must analyze how overlapping historical, technological, and economic forces have strengthened the winds; how asymmetric polarization has warmed the informational waters; and how efforts to contain the storms have instead pushed them into whole new areas on the map. Conducting such an analysis doesn’t just assess the causes, effects, and risks of conspiratorial storms. It gives the people on shore time to prepare 3 You Are Here 4. The Gathering Storm and preempt the worst impacts when the next storm arrives. The long-term goal, however, is much more ambitious than that: it’s to prevent these storms from forming in the first place. Conspiratorial Frames Conspiracy theories postulate how and why some hidden, usually underhanded, group is working toward some hidden, usually nefarious, agenda. These theories take many different forms and emerge from many different communities for many different reasons. The term conspiracy theory doesn’t hinge on truth or falsehood; an objectively false conspiracy theory and one that turns out to be fact are both conspiracy theories while they’re being theorized.2 In terms of demographics, white communities advance conspiracy theories at extremely high rates, but so do communities of color.3 No one single characteristic makes someone more inclined toward belief in conspiracy. The pervasiveness of conspiracy theories undercuts the widespread assumption that such theories are fringe phenomena. It also undercuts the stereotype of the isolated, wide-eyed true believer wearing a tinfoil hat and rummaging around what looks like a set from season 3 of the X-Files. Conspiracy theories can thrive on the margins, but they also thrive within the highest seats of power.4 They emerge during times of extreme strife and during times of relative stability.5 Some have understandable, even outright rational, origins, while some do not. For example, many of the theories that spread through Black communities have verified historical precedent, stemming from the persistent, structural, all-too-real efforts by those in power to poison, experiment on, and murder Black people.6 Other theories, like white nationalist fears that people of color are conspiring to eliminate the white race, are irrational and the opposite of precedented. In short, conspiracy theories come in as many flavors as the people who amplify them. The world of conspiracy theories is large and contains multitudes. This isn’t to say that conspiracy theories have nothing in common. American Studies scholar Peter Knight argues that conspiratorial thinking demonstrates a “pervading sense of uncontrollable forces taking over our lives, our minds, and even our bodies.”7 Richard Hofstadter, one of the most oft-cited commentators on American conspiracy theory, made a similar point in 1964, arguing that, across the political spectrum, true believers are marked by a distinctly paranoid rhetorical pattern and overall “style of mind.”8 4 You Are Here 4. The Gathering Storm This style underscores another commonality between conspiracy theories: their abiding preoccupation with some subversive them, the personification of everything we hate.9 Chapter 1 outlines the evil them of the Satanic Panics. As is the case with all subversion myths, the thing the Satanic Panics was about—Satan, of course—wasn’t the only thing it was about. Fear of the devil incarnate reflected a generations-old deep memetic frame that maintained who the us was, who the them was, and what hung in the balance if they successfully destroyed our way of life. Similar kinds of subversion myths, and all the deep memetic baggage they carry, are central to many conspiracy theories. As historian Kathryn Olmsted explains, alien subversion myths—which zero in on nonwhite or non-Christian immigrants deemed threatening to “real” Americans—are especially common within the United States; they were, according to Olmsted, the dominant conspiratorial frame in the US throughout the nineteenth century.10 Hofstadter devotes particular energy, and particular ire, to myths of this ilk, which remained prominent within right-wing circles through the twentieth century. The animating premise of these theories, Hofstadter argues, is the fear that “America has been largely taken away” from these so-called real Americans.11 Even if nothing had, in fact, been robbed from this us, the belief was that we have been victimized by them, and further, that America had been great—until all these different others came along and ruined it.