[Americans sure
can believe some cray
cray things. That’s right, I said cray cray. In this week’s series, I’ll
AmericanStudy five such conspiracy theories, past and present. Please share
your own conspiracy theories—ones you believe, or just ones you find
interesting and worth studying—for a suspicious weekend post!]
On a conspiracy theory
that foreshadowed much of our contemporary moment.
I can remember
distinctly the early 1990s moment when a sticker of a black helicopter suddenly
appeared on the back of a stop sign in my Charlottesville neighborhood (one
that I passed on my daily early morning jogs with my Mom, helping emblazon the
visual in my memory). I wasn’t quite politically savvy enough yet to wrap my
head around all that was going on, but I did connect the image
of the black helicopter to broader paranoia
about both a growing and threatening federal government and the “takeover”
of the U.S. by international bodies like
the United Nations, as well as to the role that such narratives played in Oliver
North’s 1994 Senate campaign. And it was another product of the 1994
midterms, newly elected Idaho Representative Helen Chenoweth, who brought the
black helicopters to truly national prominence, in a
New York Times interview in which
she admitted that she hadn’t seen any of the vehicles herself but still
credited the fears of them expressed by her rancher constituents.
You would think
that two decades without a UN takeover or the launching
of a New World Order would have rendered this particular conspiracy theory—one
based not on alternative narratives of the past, as have been my others this
week, but on dire predictions about the future—less compelling. But if
anything, I would argue the opposite: that the black helicopter theory itself
predicted a great deal about where we are in 2014. Take, for example, two of
the far too widely shared extremist theories about President Barack Obama: that
he is
a secret Muslim, intent on bringing Sharia
law or the like to the US; or that he is the puppet of global
internationalists like that
boogeyman George Soros, intent on submitting
the US to the will of (once again) the New World Order. Many commentators
have attributed the striking breadth of belief in such nonsensical theories to
racism, and certainly that has played a role as it has in all
extremist perspectives on Obama; but the truth is that lots of Americans were
primed to believe these theories for decades by the black helicopter narratives
and their ilk.
The contemporary
preponderance of such conspiracy theories reflects and amplifies an even bigger
problem, however. Conspiracy theories have always been about a lack of faith in
experts and evidence, indeed a willingness to see those experts and evidence as
intentionally and deviously false and falsified, designed to trick us and
demanding our skepticism and distrust as a result. According to an
April 2013 Public Policy Polling (PPP) nationwide survey on conspiracy
theories, 37% of American voters—and 58% of Republican voters, and 61% of those
who voted for Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election—believe global
warming to be a hoax. Such a belief brings together many different threads of
the black helicopters narrative and of conspiracy theories more broadly: that
rejection of experts and evidence, in favor of theories which see them as part
of the problem; a profound distrust of both the government and international
organizations; and a willingness to reject the most straightforward and simple
explanations for events and realities in favor of the most outlandish and
contrived narratives of conspiracy and collusion. The black helicopters might
never have come, that is, but in some key and unfortunate ways they seem here
to stay.
Last conspiracy
theory tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other conspiracy theories you’d highlight?
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