People who question whether the earth is round, a fact understood by the ancient Greeks and taught American children in primary school, could have been political outcasts a decade ago. Now, they are directing local republican matches in Georgia and Minnesota and seek public office in Alabama.
An outstanding extreme right activist who said, despite the years of research and intelligence that established the opposite, that terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 were an internal work by the United States government commemorated the 9/11 anniversary last year with President Trump.
And Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, promised the support of the agency last month for a fight that involves the so -called Chemtrails, an discredited theory that theory of the white condensation lines of Ay for airplanes aircraft airplanes planes.
Conspiracy theories that were relegated to random and anonymous online forums are now publicly defended or debated by increasingly powerful people. Mr. Trump in deprivation has accepted, elevated and even designated for the promotion of these theories of the people of the cabinet, giving ideas a persuasive authority and a dangerous proximity to politics.
“The real problem with the ideas and communication of conspiracy theories is when people show with the power to act on them,” said Joseph E. Uscinski, a professor at the University of Miami who studies the theory of conspiracy. “If any kind, somewhere, thinks that the earth is flat, the answer is” what? “But when people in power have those beliefs, it becomes a serious problem.”
He added: “You can end up damaging many, many people about a fantasy.”
Anna Kelly, a White House spokesman, said in a statement that the main media “have tried and could not paint President Trump as an extreme throughout his political career” and that his agenda was “common sense.”
Discredited narratives on electoral fraud and vaccines have proliferated in national discourse in the last five years. A pro-trump movement known as Qanon, which makes extravagant statements a global sexual operation of sexual treatment backed by the so-called deep state, at some point it was found as popular in the United States as some important religions.
But the conspiracy theories that now graduated in the mainstream were, until recently, much more marginal. And the people who express them are increasingly influential.
Trump and Elon Musk, the billionaire who has been called “Co -President not chosen”, have repeatedly suggested this year, without any evidence and against the guarantees of the current and previous treasure secretaries, than the fort of the fort.
Anna Paulina Luna, a republican representative of the second period of Florida whom Trump supported, has said that she believes that two shooters were involved in the murder of President of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, a conclusion that fits investigations on the murder and release of 64,000 related documents in March have not demonstrated. Ms. Lun Lun is now Heading A Task Force Establish to Examine The “Declassification of Federal Secrets” and have fold to investigate topics that have long worried conspiracy theorists, including so-call-19 pandena, The Covid Toomena and the Covid Toomena and the Covid, and the Covid, and Covid, and Covid, and Covid, and Covid, and covid COVID, AND COVID, AND COVID, AND COVID, AND COVID, AND COVID, AND COVID, AND COVID, AND COVID, AND COVID, AND COVID, AND COVID, AND COVID, AND COVID, AND COVID, AND COVID, AND COVID, AND THE LIST OF CUSTOMER OF THE COVID OF THE COVID OF THE COVID.
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene – A Georgia Republican known for expressing conspiracy theories on September 11, Schootings and forest fires initiated by Jews who hold space lasers, is in his third term. In the middle of two devastating hurricanes, this fall, he published online that “they can control the weather,” nodding a false narrative suggestion that the government can express storms.
Four years ago, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader at that time, condemned the types of “lies and conspiracy theories” that Mrs. Greene adopted as “cancer for the Republican Party and our country.” Now he is considering a Senate or an offer of governor. When he was contacted by a journalist, a congressman spokesman said his only comment was that the journalist was “crazy.”
Extravagant theories are being enabled and rewarded by the online ecosystem, said Cynthia S. Wang, professor at the Kellogg Management School of the Northwestern University, where he directs the Dispute Resolution Research Center. The social media platforms, he said, classify people in eco cameras, facilitate the production of convincingly elegant publications and use metrics to encourage the content caused by a reaction.
Add a chaotic news cycle, full of wars, natural disasters, economic agitation and other inductive anxiety characteristics, and conspiracy theories become even attractive because they seem to explain inexplicable things, experts said.
“Many people with authority know that rhetoric is powerful: it is a way to enliven uncertainty and then say: ‘Hey, if you listen to me, I can help you with your uncertainty and make sure that group is well,” said Dr. Wang. “That is really striking.”
Politicians understand that conspiracy theories are “what scratches our collective psychic itching,” said John Llewellyn, associate professor of communication at the University of Wake Forest who studies urban and rhetorical legends. Repeating such narratives and promising to act on them, allows a kind of rhetorical sleeve of the hand, such as performance, a card of cards with your right hand to cross what is happening with the left, he said.
The search for political actions on the non -existent hazards of Chemtrails, for example, allows officials to deliver “symbolic satisfaction that you cannot not be note no, not really cannot be done no.
Wild narratives are causing real world problems.
The correlation between support for political violence and the tendency to classify events and circumstances as the results of the conspiracies tripled in magnitude of 2012 to 2022, according to an essay published in December by several researchers, including Dr. Uscinski of the University of Miami. The researchers theorized that the wave could be CAA due to a constant increase in polarization, a decrease in confidence in institutions or the conspirator and violent language of Mr. Trump.
The Institute of Strategic Dialogue, a group of non -partisan experts, identified an eruption of violent incidents last year linked to perpetrators influenced by conspiracy theories about Chemtrails, 9/11, elections, pandemic and more. One was a man who, fed by anger against the government, immigrants, the gay community and the Black Lives Matter movement, according to the prosecutors, killed and then decapitated his father, a former federal employee.
“For radicalized people, whose world views are deformed by thesis theories and who are already prepared to commit violence, political developments and other events have the potential to serve as catalysts for action,” the researchers wrote.
A cycle of feedback of conspiracy theories has formed at all levels of the US government, according to surveillance groups. The efforts to break the chain are fabrics: erroneous and misinformation researchers have faced years of political pressure, including a decision of the National Foundation of Sciences last month to qualify the relationship of subsidies with research in the field.
What other issues are from rejection to the center of attention? Angelo Carusone, the president of Media Matters, a left -wing defense group that monitors the wrong information, said it was “quite optimistic with demons like the next great.”
Trump referred to the “demonic forces” in the campaign and called the Democrats a “very demonic party.” Days before interviewing both Donald Trump Jr. and Mr. Musk in Mar-A-Lago on election day, Tucker Carlson, former Fox News presenter, published a YouTube video claiming that he had attacked at night “for a demon or something unites.” Dan Bongino, an expert and right -wing podcaster who is now the deputy director of the Federal Research Office, said in his program that “Demon Energy is real.”
“It is no longer an abstraction, these are direct demons,” said Carusone. “Fever swamps are our whole reality at this time.”
