Conspiracy theories can be double-edged sword

Opinion

MAGA is having a moment. About a minute. A missing minute to be exact. A missing minute of jailhouse videotape that would prove the infamous financier and alleged underage sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was murdered to cover up a secret client list of powerful men. Sex, lies, and videotape all in one.

The Make America Great Again cult is not happy. Not with the hated Democrats this time, but with its own. This is a new experience for them. It’s one thing to believe there’s a deep-state conspiracy by your opponents against you; quite another when there’s a deep-state conspiracy by your own team against you.

U.S. President Donald Trump promised in his re-election campaign to release all the Department of Justice files on Epstein. The deep state would give up its deep secrets. His MAGA base ate it up. The fervent faithful anticipated big reveals after Trump won. Absolute proof of deep-state activity was just a short inauguration away. What they got instead — a nothing burger — is leaving them furious, this time at their own leaders.

Last week, Trump’s DOJ issued a definitive memo on their internal Epstein investigation. “This systematic review revealed no incriminating ‘client list,’” the memo states. “There was also no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions.”

For good measure, they released hours of unedited jailhouse footage showing there was no “missing minute” during which someone entered Epstein’s cell on the day he committed suicide. Simple explanation says Trump’s former personal attorney and now U.S. Attorney General, Pam Bondi. “We learned from the Bureau of Prisons that every night they redo that video … So, every night the video is reset, and every night should have the same minute missing.” Go figure.

The MAGA backlash was immediate and intense. Right-wing podcasters and long-term MAGA luminaries went ballistic. The prime target of their ire so far is Bondi. She was “incompetent,” said one; “lazy” said another; had “willingly humiliated some of the president’s most loyal supporters,” said a third; “should resign for lying to the American People,” said a fourth.

You get the picture.

Bondi painted the bull’s-eye on herself when she claimed Epstein’s client list was sitting on the “corner of her desk” and that “truckloads” of documents existed. She had the goods, she implied, and they were coming out. Until they weren’t. As with all conspiracy theories, the goods never existed.

There’s a big lesson here for right-wing, populist politicians and parties. Trafficking in conspiracy theories to get votes is a double-edged sword. One that can point right back at you when they turn out to be false as Trump World is finding out.

Populism springs from an anti-elite impulse directed against “the system,” personified by the state itself. Populists invent enemies, manufacture grievances, and spin conspiracies to create an us-and-them dynamic. A binary frame of elites versus regular people, insiders versus outsiders, and expertise versus common sense is constructed to magnify dissension. Once framed and set, it is not easy to reset.

Conspiracy theories have become the weapon of choice in this populist battle. Once marginal, they are now mainstream. Simple and seductive, they offer a “rational” explanation to the motivated for why things happen. Why the system is against them, and they can’t get ahead. While not all populist movements or politicians embrace conspiracy theories, democracy ignores their presence at its peril.

COVID-19 was a veritable petri dish for breeding new conspiracy theories. With only a computer screen between themselves and the locked-down outside world, the marginalized believers had time and agency to trade pandemic theory and rumour without interruption.

The list was extensive. The virus was a genetically modified bioweapon; it stemmed from a deliberate lab leak in China; the mRNA vaccines will alter your DNA by planting a microchip; the pandemic was engineered by a secret world order to reduce and control citizens via lockdowns; it was part of the globalist Great Reset population theory.

A study of the first year of the pandemic published in the National Library of Medicine identified 637 distinct COVID-related rumours and conspiracy theories. While the U.S. led all countries in hosting the largest number of these with almost a hundred, Canada had its share with more than a dozen. When it comes to an infodemic, no country is immune.

This helps explain why three years after the pandemic petered out, the last Canadians to move on are the vestiges of the 2021-22 trucker convoy, libertarian and anti-government cohorts within federal and provincial conservative parties, and far-right extremist freedom movements themselves. In other words, those opposed in the first instance to government public health actions and mandates. Why? Predisposition. They are all predisposed to reject science, distrust experts, believe they are being discriminated against, and require an alternative explanation to justify their beliefs.

Which makes the Epstein fallout worth watching. The MAGA storm now rebounding on its leaders may come to convince populists that it is in their own interest to moderate or cease their conspiracy theories before the conspiracy theories come for them. As they inevitably will.

As The X Files TV series said, “The truth is out there.”

David McLaughlin is a former clerk of the executive council and cabinet secretary in the Manitoba government.