“Mandrake, have you ever seen a Commie drink a glass of water?”

by David Benjamin

“July eighth, 1979, all the fathers of Nobel Prize winners were rounded up by United Nations military units… and actually forced at gunpoint to give semen samples in little plastic jars, which are now stored below Rockefeller Center underneath the ice skating rink…” 

— Jerry Fletcher (Mel Gibson), in Conspiracy Theory

MADISON, Wis. — Used to be, the popular image of a conspiracy theorist was a bug-eyed hermit wearing a tinfoil helmet and writing his memoirs in lemon juice on flash-paper. But now, with a conspiracist in the Oval Office, who’s been lately regaling the denizens of Twitterworld with the wit and wisdom of Chuck “Love Connection” Woolery, twitchiness has gone mainstream, tempting more and more of us to stay awake all night, clutching an andiron, waiting for Nancy Pelosi to crawl out from under the bed. 

But how did we get here?

Richard Hofstadter, in his landmark essay on The Paranoid Style in American Politics traces our native conspiracism back to the 18th century. Then, the arbiters of civic order saw a young nation being contaminated by secret forces who fomented Catholicism, practiced Freemasonry and received coded orders from the dread, shadowy Illuminati. Quoting conspiracist author John Robison, Hofstadter cites fears that the Illuminati were a sort of chemical cabal concocting evil potions, among them a “tea that caused abortion, a secret substance that ‘blinds or kills when spurted in the face,’ and a device that sounds like a stench bomb—a ‘method for filling a bed-chamber with with pestilential vapors.’”

Conspiracism has flourished ever since, manifesting itself, for example, in the Sedition Act of 1798, Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus, the Palmer raids of 1919-20 and the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Post-war political paranoia blossomed with the House Un-American Activities Committee’s Hollywood blacklist, followed by Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s crusade against numberless hordes of imaginary Communists infesting the U.S. government. 

However, the conspiracism of HUAC and Tail Gunner Joe was imperfect because the villains of their fevered and clumsy quest actually existed. Virtually everyone they accused, grilled and slandered was innocent of any sort of espionage. But history reveals that there were a few actual Soviet spies prowling the bowels of the U.S. government, all of them too clever to be caught by a motley crew of grandstanding Republicans.

Conspiracism made its greatest leap toward prime-time after November 1963. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy launched, literally, a fleet of sinister theories. Since then, no year has passed without the publication of at least a dozen books that purport to tell the true story of who really (not Lee Harvey Oswald) shot JFK (plus the occasional book-length claim that Jack is alive and well, living in an undisclosed location with Elvis and Natalie Wood). 

The JFK fantasy is the richest and most seductive of all because it contains the three essential elements of the ideal conspiracy theory. Above all, none of the thousand Dallas scenarios — full of grassy knolls, second (and third) shooters and rampant Zapruders— contain even a shred of solid evidence that can be proven and corroborated. Every claim is conjecture, every suspect a phantom. 

The fact that no fragment of any variation on JFK’s apparent assassination can be verified makes it the archetypal paranoid myth. In the words of Jerry Mitchell (Mel Gibson) in Conspiracy Theory, “A good conspiracy is unprovable. I mean, if you can prove it, it means they screwed up somewhere along the line.”

Absence of evidence provides irrefutable proof that yes!, there is a conspiracy, right under our noses. The less we know about it, the more we know it’s true! 

Of course, the imprimatur of any conspiracy theory is its rejection by established authority. The verdict of the Warren Commission, which investigated JFK’s death, is patently invalid because the Warren Commission investigated JFK’s death. Disbelief of elites, especially those imbued with government authority, is conspiracism’s active ingredient. The Establishment’s scorn for a conspiracy theory simply goes to show that the massive cover-up goes all the way to the Top!

Since JFK died, conspiracy theories have evolved into a national cottage industry, like quilting or polka bands. In the Sixties, liberals, hippies and left-wingers enjoyed a renaissance of paranoia, partly because J. Edgar Hoover, General Hershey and Dick Nixon really were out to get us. But, as Hofstadter has noted, conspiracism is, historically, the province of the Right. 

Since 1963, the paranoid tradition, nurtured by conservative firebrands like Phyllis Schlafly, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, has sustained a steady flow of nightmarish hallucinations. But it was digital technology in the form of the World Wide Web, and shameless demagogy from an unhinged and uninhibitable president that turned tinfoil and flash-paper into the material of mainstream intercourse. 

I hadn’t entirely grasped the Trump-era pervasiveness of conspiracism until a couple of discursive and mildly neurotic emails from Ivanhoe (not his real name). Until recently, Ivanhoe had always seemed a garden-variety Republican with a dread of deficits and a distaste for food stamps. But his email evinced a note of apocalyptic angst that wasn’t characteristic of a guy who grew up amiably amongst the tweedy liberals and coffee-house poets in the People’s Republic of Madison.     

In June, for example, Ivanhoe and I exchanged notes on Antifa, a group blamed by Trump for the upheaval that followed George Floyd’s murder. No known Antifa member has been arrested or even seen at any of a thousand Black Lives Matter protests. Antifa has yet to utter a word in any known forum. But Ivanhoe explained that this facade of invisibility and silence is exactly the proof that Antifa is everywhere. Antifa, he explained, is “Not Supposed To Be Seen. They seize an opportunity to disrupt, get things stirred up and then disappear into the shadows. It’s in their playbook and they have executed it flawlessly.”

People take sincerely to the streets, intending to peacably protest four centuries of systemic racism. But as we march, Antifa whispers subliminally in our ears. We become their marionettes. We pillage businesses and tear down statues, even as the puppeteer slips into the shadows and licks his lips. Protesters, Ivanhoe explains, are sheep. “They have tunnel vision and look only at what’s in front of them and once the demonstrators get revved up, they no longer need Antifa.”

In July, Ivanhoe warned that these leftist lambs will hate Donald Trump so blindly that we’ll literally go mad. In our delirium, we’ll install in the White House a senile dotard who’s somehow even more gormless than Trump. There, as he sits oblivious in the Oval Office, the sirens of Antifa, Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, will ply old white Joe with apples, wine, honey and dusky flesh.

Ivanhoe predicts, “When the country slides ignominiously into socialism, the newly powerful will subjugate the ‘privileged’ white population… like George Santayana predicted, history will repeat itself and reverse discrimination will rule the day. The white middle class will cease to exist.”

After America’s insidious slide into Marxism, the politburo — er, Congress— will declare the feeble-minded geezer unfit, invoke the 25th Amendment “and President Joe will be driven off into the Delaware sunset, muttering to himself, ‘What just happened? I thought I was in charge. Where’s Barack? Is it Tuesday?’”

This is the sort of juicy myth-making, rife with Trumpian tropes and trollops, that I doubt Ivanhoe — once an easygoing Eisenhower Republican— could have imagined before the Donald primped his coif, descalated from his Tower, tweeted “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of paranoia.