Last summer, the PBS Frontline documentary United States of Conspiracy aired. This excellent program described important changes in our nation that led to the unpredicted, poll-defying election of a media personality with no political or public service experience, a long string of allegations of fraud, at best lackluster business accomplishments, and little respect or interest in using education or expertise in decision making. Anna Merlan, author of Republic of Lies, was among those featured. Her important book documents how conspiracy theories and their believers have moved from being light entertainment to a national threat.

Merlan starts by sharing her experiences on a journalist assignment covering “Conspira-Sea,” a 2015 weeklong “conspiracy cruise.” Her week on a ship full of people who were absolutely certain that incredible things were happening just out of sight, events were connected just outside of public consciousness, alternative explanations outside of the media reporting were what was truly important, and that these things were on the cutting edge of understanding. Soon, they believed, the public would become aware of and see the truth of the things they believed now.

Ho hum. If you read the Skeptical Inquirer, you’ve probably read things like this before.

But she soon began to notice that the ideas, people, and institutions she’d learned of on the conspiracy cruise were seemingly invading her mainstream journalism assignments. For instance, she stumbled across self-identified “journalists” from Alex Jones’s Infowars, one of the largest, most dangerous, and most notorious conspiracy mongers and promoters in the nation, while covering the 2016 Republican National Convention. Conspiracy theories, such as Obama “birtherism,” were part of right-wing discourse and Trump’s rise to prominence. Of course, conspiracy theories have always been part of American culture, and they exist on all parts of the political spectrum, more so at the ends. “But while conspiracy theories are as old as the country itself,” she writes (8), “there is something new at work: people who peddle lies and half-truths have come to prominence, fame, and power as never before.”

In Chapter 1, “False times,” she shares more of what is happening, how it came to pass, and where it appears to be going. “Conspiracy theories tend to flourish especially at times of rapid social change, when we’re reevaluating ourselves, and, perhaps, facing uncomfortable questions in the process” (15). She notes that a prominent thread in many or most conspiracy theories is that they depict a world in which there is a great hidden and not-so-hidden continuous battle between the forces of good and evil, with the conspiracy theorists pushing these ideas firmly convinced they are on the side of good, exposing evil. She ties this in with the history of the United States and its heavy influence by founders from strongly religious groups. She mentions Jesse Walker’s The United States of Paranoia, a work I reviewed previously in these pages (March/April 2015).

Merlan’s descriptions reminded me of Ted Daniels’s A Doomsday Reader: Prophets, Predictors, and Hucksters of Salvation (1999, New York University), a work that describes and gives examples of a widely spread culturally, globally, and historically diverse “mono-myth” that “some day, some day soon, great and terrible events will happen, big changes will follow, the evil people will be punished for being evil, and the good people, people like us, will be rewarded for being good.”

As she writes:

That sense of fragility and distrust are particularly noticeable again in the mid-2000s, huge swaths of people feel locked out of the political process, not even bothering to vote out of a belief that it won’t make a difference. We have a stunning and increased lack of social mobility, a profound distrust of “elites and those in power,” as well as a persistent fear of “outsiders” and “others” taking what we see as limited resources. Combined with deep inequalities of race and class, all that makes for an environment that’s unusual outside of repressive countries with authoritarian regimes and state-run media.

Merlan describes how much of the modern right wing feels that America has largely been taken away from them and their kind. She notes that there is a distinct class element among conspiracy thinking, most prevalent among lower income, lower educated people.

One chapter focuses on conspiracy thinking among the African American population. Why do many African Americans falsely believe that the U.S. government purposely detonated the levees in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 with the intent to flood African American neighborhoods? In large part it’s because, according to Merlan, during the 1927 Great Mississippi Flood, the authorities did exactly that, choosing to flood African American neighborhoods to prevent expected flooding of the white neighborhoods. And any discussion of African American belief in conspiracy theories must include mention of the FBI’s COINTELPRO program and the Tuskegee experiment. Merlan also discusses the spread of various conspiracy theory elements through hip-hop music, something most whites rarely notice.

Of particular interest to traditional skeptics and longtime readers of this publication will be Chapter 9, “The Politics of UFOs.” While giving a good overview of conspiracy-type beliefs within the UFO community, Merlan notices a distinct and important shift within its more extreme members. In decades past, the bulk of prominent UFO believers thought they were doing cutting edge scientific research or were about to find hard evidence that the scientific community would not be able to deny. The focus was on finding and sharing evidence of current, ongoing alien visitation and offering the proof. (For insight into why this did not happen, simply read back issues of this magazine.)

But things have changed, Merlan says. UFOlogy’s current focus, she reports, are people who claim to have had access to special knowledge of what is “really” going on, alleging personal participation in hidden government programs that supposedly dealt firsthand with aliens, now coming forth to share their revelations. Often these allegedly firsthand reports make no real attempt to offer proof; some are constructed in such a way that proof is impossible. This is distinctly different from UFOlogy’s traditional, clumsy attempts at doing science. The UFO community, Merlan writes, is now increasingly discussing secret projects of the hidden government, often tied in with bizarre reports of Obama birtherism and other conspiracy theory elements. (On page 203, Merlan shares that Andrew Basiago, a program speaker at the 2017 MUFON conference she attended, told attendees that as a child he was allegedly part of a secret mission to Mars accompanied by Barack Obama using his “foreign student name” of Barry Soetoro.) This shift in focus on style of claim has caused a great change within MUFON, an organization that traditionally claimed to be scientific in nature.

Merlan’s book discusses the possibility that some of these conspiracies may be and undoubtedly are true. For instance, the Russians did indeed interfere in the 2016 election and are indeed working to spread conspiratorial thinking, something many conservatives tried to dismiss. She also discusses the way Russian “troll farms” and bots, masquerading as social media accounts, use the anti-vaccination movement and other issues not just to spread harmful ideas but to intensify and emotionalize Americans’ responses and increase social friction. She also mentions QAnon—the pro-Trump cult-like belief system based in conspiracy thinking—Pizzagate, and others. Although a 2019 publication, this work is well worth reading to understand what is happening now.