Turf Wars, Songbird-Style

Turf Wars, Songbird-Style

In springtime, everything in nature loves a wall. 

By Margaret Renkl NY Times

Contributing Opinion Writer

NASHVILLE — I was eating lunch on our front stoop last week when a flock of European starlings descended all at once, covering our yard in a commotion of strutting and whistling and picking and whirring. The spring wildflowers were all bloomed out, nothing left but greenery, so my husband had mowed the meadow in front of our house into some semblance of a suburban lawn. A freshly mowed yard means fewer places for insects to hide, and the starlings got busy gleaning and digging.

I am no fan of European starlings. I would like European starlings just fine if they had stayed in Europe, but some foolish Shakespeare aficionados, determined to introduce into this country every bird ever mentioned in Shakespeare, released 100 starlings in New York City’s Central Park during the 19th century. The more than 200 million starlings in North America today descended from those first 100 birds.

Starlings compete for nesting cavities with native cavity-dwellers: bluebirds and tree swallows, woodpeckers and chickadees, wood ducks and tufted titmice. There’s a pair nesting in a woodpecker’s hole in a tree in front of my neighbor’s house, and three pairs nesting in the hollow window frames of another neighbor’s house. Every time I pass by them, I glower out of nothing but old habit. A 2003 study disputed long-held assumptions that starlings displace native birds. “Only sapsuckers showed declines due to starlings,” according to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology; “other species appeared to be holding their own against the invaders.” But long-held assumptions are hard habits to break, and I have never warmed to these gregarious birds.

The bluebirds that have chosen the nest box in our front yard share my dislike. The male bluebird set up an angry clicking from his perch in a nearby maple as soon as the flock landed in our yard, and when one of them had the nerve to peer into the nest-box hole — which is, by design, too small to admit a starling — he immediately dived at the intruder’s head, startling it so thoroughly that it fell to the ground before it could stop its headlong tumble and fly away.

The rest of the starlings were unperturbed by this spectacle, but the female bluebird inside the box was drawn to the fray, peeking out of the hole of the nest box as her mate staged unceasing guerrilla raids on the intruders from a low-hanging branch in his lookout tree.

As soon as a starling bent to stab its bill into the soil, the male bluebird hit it in the head from above and was gone again before it could discern the source of its torment. Divebombing one starling after another, the bluebird carried on his relentless territorial campaign. Finally, through no signal that I could discern, the starlings lifted as one and disappeared into the sky. The bluebird, badly outnumbered by larger birds, had successfully driven them all away.

Matters always get tense during nesting season. “The dawn chorus” is what we call the springtime music that fills the trees at break of day this time of year, but it is nothing like a human chorus. Birds sing to attract a mate, and they sing to establish territory. And that territorialism is deadly serious.

While the bluebird was successfully repelling the flock of starlings, I later discovered, a tiny house wren was pulling all the moss and all the speckled eggs out of the nest box on the other side of the house. Instead of a chickadee’s mossy nest, that box now holds a house wren’s nest of sticks. Audubon still lists Tennessee as uncommon breeding territory for house wrens, but they have nested in our yard for at least five years. Every year they wreak havoc on the chickadees, and often on the bluebirds, too.

I can hardly fault them for doing exactly what the bluebirds are doing: staking out a claim and defending it against encroachers. I tell myself, too, not to fault the red-bellied woodpecker, which this year has taken an inexplicable interest in my safflower feeder, for driving away the rose-breasted grosbeaks that have finally arrived here on their long migration north. I wait for the grosbeaks every spring, and I buy that expensive safflower seed for two reasons: 1) starlings don’t like it, and 2) grosbeaks do. And now this furious woodpecker keeps driving them away.

I can’t help thinking about these avian territorial disputes every time the president of the United States weighs in on the subject of immigration. The president is determined to “defend our border,” as though we were under some kind of military siege, never mind that the boundary he’s so eager to defend was established by actual bloodshed — the blood of human beings who were here first.

Just as there are enough insects in my yard for both starlings and bluebirds, enough safflower seeds for both the local birds and the wayfaring strangers, there is plenty of room in this country for the people who already live here, as well as for the refugees who are desperate to come in, but the president’s base doesn’t believe that. Those poorer voters — whose anti-immigrant anger is energetically encouraged and exploited by the president’s wealthy constituents — are still howling, “Build that wall!” even as they continue to vote for politicians whose policies add to their own impoverishment — suppressing wages, gutting public schools, blocking access to health care, increasing gun violence, poisoning the places where they live.

Nevertheless, they direct their anger outward. Every newcomer is an alien competing for resources, and resources are already hard enough to come by in their own lives.

This is an argument from analogy, of course, and arguments from analogy inevitably falter because they’re reductive: The analogues are never perfectly equivalent. Human beings aren’t birds. We are capable of understanding and accepting logical arguments. We are capable of acting on moral and ethical imperatives. But springtime is a reminder that we — all of us, liberals and conservatives alike — are also creatures subject to the same atavistic impulses that drive the natural world. And when it seems as though there’s not enough to go around, nature will always have the upper hand.

Emma Goldman’s Bookshelf

Emma Goldman’s Bookshelf

By Candace Falk as told to Cori Brosnahan (PBS)

 To understand the people who've profoundly impacted history, we're exploring the books that profoundly impacted them. Here, Candace Falk, founding director of the Emma Goldman Papers research project at the University of California, Berkeley, tells us about the anarchist thinker's interest in edgy literature, passion for European plays, and deep study of the writers who shaped the U.S. Constitution. 

You might be surprised to know that a lot of what influenced Emma was literature. When she was young in Russia, she read this novel by Chernyshevsky called What Is to Be Done?  — Lenin actually took that title for a pamphlet he wrote later. But Chernyshevsky’s novel was about cooperative living, about people who lived together who weren’t married, who shared their money, who had interchangeable partners within their household. And this was an inspiration to Emma as a vision of another way to live. That Chernyshevsky novel was high on the list of the things she read and cared about.

Then, when she came to the U.S., she just read endlessly. At first in Russian, German, and Yiddish, and progressively more in English. She was so interested in being modern, being cutting edge. She was always going on to the next thing. There were some novels like Comrade Yetta that she liked because it was about a Jewish immigrant who came to New York. Emma identified with the immigrant experience. She never denied her Jewish roots, and actually attributed her perseverance to the perseverance of her people. But I do think she had a little bit of an aversion to all who only stuck to their own culture.

Various people who worked with her — anarchists from Austria, Germany, or Russia — gave her lists of books to read. Beauty and elegance and language were all part of what an anarchist needed to know. She read writers like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev. She took on Emil Zola, Olive Schreiner, and Frank Harris. She read Galsworthy, George Sand, George Eliot, and D.H. Lawrence. Theodore Dreiser was important. So was Mark Twain — she appreciated him as an American humorist, with an edge.

She was close to Jack London. She really liked his stories, and admired his accessibility and commitment social justice. She even asked him to write the introduction for Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist by Alexander Berkman, her “chum of a lifetime.” London wrote an interesting introduction, but in the end, Goldman and Berkman rejected it because it kind of dissed anarchism and held up socialism as the real thing.

Of course, she was completely entranced with the theater (as a lecturer, she was quite theatrical herself). She read Ibsen and Strindberg. She loved George Bernard Shaw, who wrote Mrs. Warren’s Profession to show the economic realities that foster prostitution. Gerhart Hauptmann was also one of her heroes. He wrote the play Lonely Lives. It acknowledges the inner struggle of the person who has a vision of a better life but has to live in the world in which they exist. There’s this gap, this loneliness of being in-between and often misunderstood. Emma identified with that.

In French drama, one of the plays she liked was about Chanticleer. Chanticleer is a rooster who suddenly finds out that he’s not the one who makes the sun rise — but still has to prepare the people to meet it. I think Emma identified with that, too. The sun of anarchy was not going to rise during her lifetime, but she took it as her task to prepare people with an image of what it might look like.

Emma wanted to introduce people — in the United States, especially — to European theater, which had a stronger connection to political critique. She wrote a book called The Social Significance of the Modern Drama, which included dramatists from Scandinavia, Germany, France, England, Ireland, and Russia. She believed that the theater shouldn’t be only for the rich and the privileged. She once gave a drama lecture in a mineshaft.

She had many friends who were writers. She was very influenced in an interesting way by Margaret Anderson, an avant-garde lesbian writer, who was the editor of a literary magazine called The Little Review. Anderson took chances when she published James Joyce, Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats, and Djuna Barnes, most of whom were considered offbeat and controversial at the time.

Emma gravitated toward edgier stuff, too. There was one novel she really liked called Three Weeks that was very out there in terms of sexuality and was banned. Emma’s magazine, Mother Earth, was a conduit for people to order hard-to-find books, including some that were banned. And there was a Mother Earth bookshop in Greenwich Village that eventually had to close because it was also a great place for government surveillance agents to catch and arrest young men who had not registered for the draft.

In terms of theory, she had a patchwork of influences. That was one of the most interesting things about her — how she would take a little bit from this person and a little bit from that person. She wasn’t a dogmatic follower of anybody, but she liked to popularize their ideas and weave them into a new fabric of her own.

From Mikhail Bakunin, she took the spirit of revolt and a strong atheist streak and ideas of anarchist collectivism. But she distanced herself from Bakunin’s economic theories in favor of Peter Kropotkin’s. She was actually very close to Kropotkin. He emphasized the right of individuals to the resources necessary to meet their basic needs — giving what one could, but taking only what one needed from the shared accumulation of wealth.

She incorporated ideas on insurrectionism from Errico Malatesta and the early Johann Most. To her, individual acts of political violence were an inevitable response to the state’s use of violence to maintain its power. What can I say? She came from Russia, where that actually did change things, and it took a while to figure out what would work here and what wouldn’t.

She also read Friedrich Engels’ The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State. A lot of the anarchists read that. They shared the perception that marriage was an economic arrangement and the primary foundation for the concept and practice of private property.

Early American thinkers influenced her as well. She read Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine with great interest. Goldman shared their concern for protecting individual freedom and their worries about the tyranny of too much government. She incorporated ideas of civil disobedience from Thoreau, and found kindred spirits in American rebels like Wendell Phillips, and the more militant John Brown. Most of all, she celebrated the unharnessed spirit through the writings of Walt Whitman.

She lectured on Nietzsche — his theories about the centrality of individual will outside of conventional morality. She also read Freud. His assertion about the centrality of sexuality had a big impact on her. Although for Freud a lot of creativity came from a suppression of sexual urges, and for Goldman creativity came from expressing your sexual urges.

There are some people who think that she didn’t have any ideas of her own, who think she wasn’t an original thinker. That makes me upset. What they don’t get is — first of all, what’s original? If anybody could be called original, it was her. Second of all, she took it as her mission to educate people about ideas that would move them forward. She didn’t tout herself as a theorist in the way others did. She really was a public intellectual in the best sense — and reading both informed and expanded the breadth of her life and her work.

WHAT’S NEW ABOUT CONSPIRACY THEORIES?

WHAT’S NEW ABOUT CONSPIRACY THEORIES?

Outsiders have always had a weakness for paranoid fantasies. Now our leaders are conspiracists, too.

By Elizabeth Kolbert The New Yorker

Crazy ideas have long been a fixture of American life. Now paranoia thrives at the center of power, not just the fringes.

On the morning of December 4, 2016, Edgar Maddison Welch, a warehouse worker and a father of two from Salisbury, North Carolina, told his family that he had a few things to do; loaded an AR-15, a .38-calibre revolver, and a folding knife into his car; and headed for Washington, D.C. Welch’s intention, he later told police, was to “self-investigate” a plot featuring—in no particular order—Hillary Clinton, sex trafficking, satanic rituals, and pizza.

At around 3 p.m., Welch arrived at Comet Ping Pong, a restaurant in Chevy Chase, where, he believed, children were being held in a network of tunnels. He made his way to the kitchen, shot open a locked door, and discovered cooking utensils. In an interview from jail, a few days later, he acknowledged to the Times, “The intel on this wasn’t a hundred percent.” He’d found no captive children in the restaurant’s basement; in fact, as many accounts of the incident noted, Comet Ping Pong doesn’t even have a basement.

Far from being dissuaded by the new “intel,” believers in what had become known as Pizzagate dug in. Welch had dabbled in acting—he’d appeared as a victim in a low-budget slasher movie—thus, it followed, his raid on the restaurant had been staged. That the plotters had gone to such lengths to cover their tracks showed just how much evil there was to hide. “This shit runs very deep,” a contributor to the subreddit thread r/Conspiracy wrote. All the while, the restaurant’s owner was receiving death threats.

Some ten months after the incident at Comet Ping Pong, a prediction surfaced on the Web that Clinton would soon be arrested. “Expect massive riots organized in defiance,” an anonymous poster, Q, warned on the message board 4chan. Other prophecies followed: Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, would also be arrested; members of the media would be “jailed as deep cover agents”; there would be a Twitter blackout heralding a government purge.

As Q’s prophecies failed, more converts were won over. QAnon, as Q’s world view came to be known, subsumed—or, if you prefer, consumed—Pizzagate, and then it, too, slunk off the Web and into the world. Last June, an unemployed former marine named Matthew Wright parked a home-built armored truck on the Mike O’Callaghan–Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge, which spans the Colorado River on the border of Arizona and Nevada. Wright, who, like Welch, was armed with an AR-15 and a handgun, blocked traffic for almost ninety minutes before surrendering to police. At one point, he held up a sign that said “Release the OIG report,” a reference to another QAnon prediction, involving the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General. Following his arrest, Wright wrote a letter to the White House saying that he “simply wanted the truth on behalf of all Americans, all of humanity for that matter.”

America has always had a weakness for paranoid fantasies. According to some historians, the Founding Fathers were moved to write the Declaration of Independence by groundless fears of a British plot. “Conspiracy Theories in American History,” a two-volume encyclopedia, runs from “Abolitionism” to “zog.” (zog, an acronym used by survivalists, is shorthand for the “Zionist Occupied Government,” which, the encyclopedia explains, refers to an “international Jewish conspiracy to undermine U.S. sovereignty and true Christianity.”) In between are some three hundred entries, including “Black Helicopters,” “Contrails,” “Illuminati,” “Moon Landings,” “Pan Am 103,” and “Roswell.”

In this context, Pizzagate and QAnon could be considered madness as usual—just two late-alphabet entries in the annals of national crankdom. But is that all there is to it? Or are deeper, darker forces at work? A confirmed conspiracist now occupies the White House and, “no collusion” notwithstanding, there’s evidence that an international conspiracy put him there. Coincidence? To paraphrase Q, perhaps it’s time to “expand our thinking.”

Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum are professors of government at, respectively, Dartmouth and Harvard. A few years ago, they found themselves, in their words, “startled into thought.” Yes, they knew, crazy ideas were a fixture of American life. But not this crazy. “The subject required more detailed and thoughtful interpretation,” the two write at the beginning of “A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy.”

“Classic” conspiracy theories, according to Muirhead and Rosenblum, arise in response to real events—the assassination of John F. Kennedy, say, or the terrorist attacks of September 11th. Such theories, they argue, constitute a form of explanation, however inaccurate they may be. What sets theories like QAnon apart is a lack of interest in explanation. Indeed, as with the nonexistent child-trafficking ring being run out of the nonexistent basement, “there is often nothing to explain.” The professors observe, “The new conspiracism sometimes seems to arise out of thin air.”

The constituency, too, has shifted. Historically, Muirhead and Rosenblum maintain, it’s been out-of-power groups that have been drawn to tales of secret plots. Today, it’s those in power who insist the game is rigged, and no one more insistently than the so-called leader of the free world.

Donald Trump got his start in national politics as a “birther,” promoting the idea that President Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States. Several news organizations have tried to keep track of the conspiracy theories Trump has floated since then. One list, posted by the Web site Business Insider, has nineteen entries. These include the claims that vaccines can cause autism and that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia may have been murdered.

“They’re saying they found the pillow on his face,” Trump said of Scalia, during the 2016 campaign, “which is a pretty unusual place to find a pillow.” (The Business Insider list is limited to full-blown conspiracy theories, and excludes the President’s more casual lies and fabrications.) “No president—indeed, no national official—has resorted to accusations of conspiracy so instinctively, so frequently, and with such brio as Donald Trump,” Muirhead and Rosenblum write.

With Trump in power, they worry, there’s a danger that his dark fantasies may be realized. Democracies depend on buy-in; citizens need to believe in certain basics, starting with the legitimacy of elections. Trump both runs the government and runs it down. The electoral system, he asserts, can’t be trusted. Voter fraud is rampant. His contempt for institutions ranging from the courts (“slow and political”) to the Federal Communications Commission (“so sad and unfair”) to the F.B.I. (“What are they hiding?”) weakens those institutions, thereby justifying his contempt. As government agencies “lose competence and capacity, they will come to look more and more illegitimate to more and more people,” Muirhead and Rosenblum observe.

Trump is so closely tied to the “new conspiracism” that it can be hard to tell the ranter from the rant. Then again, it’s hard to imagine his ascent without other key developments: the polarization of the electorate, a generation of attacks (mostly from the right) on the news media and government, and, of course, the rise of the Web. Spreading conspiracy theories once had a price—printing or even mimeographing a tract costs money—but now, as Muirhead and Rosenblum point out, anyone can post a madcap theory or a doctored photograph virtually for free.

The Internet revolution “has displaced the gatekeepers, the producers, editors, and scholars who decided what was worthy of dissemination,” they write. This has opened the way for “conspiracy entrepreneurs” who proffer “a seemingly infinite array of wild accusations.”

Is it possible to make a rigorous study of conspiracy theories? The task seems self-punishing, like trying to housebreak a chicken. Nevertheless, this is the mission that Joseph E. Uscinski and Joseph M. Parent have chosen to take on. Research into conspiracy theories “has been hampered by a lack of long-term systematic data,” Uscinski and Parent, political scientists at the University of Miami and the University of Notre Dame, respectively, write in “American Conspiracy Theories.” Fortunately, “methods are now available to better scrutinize what we think we know.”

One of these methods is polling. Uscinski and Parent commissioned a survey of more than twelve hundred Americans, which asked them to react to statements like “Much of our lives are being controlled by plots hatched in secret places.” On the basis of their answers, respondents were sorted into three groups: “high” (those predisposed to conspiratorial thinking), “low” (those opposed to it), and “medium” (those in the middle). Then the researchers looked at the cross-tabulations. The less educated the respondent, the more likely he or she was to be a “high.” The poor tended to be more conspiratorially inclined than the rich. Roughly equal proportions of Democrats and Republicans were given to conspiracizing, but among respondents who identified with neither party the proportion jumped.

The conspiracy-minded, Uscinski and Parent conclude, “deserve their reputation as outsiders.” They are less likely to vote and more apt to view bloodshed as a form of political protest. While eighty per cent of the “lows” rejected the idea that “violence is sometimes an acceptable way to express disagreement with the government,” among the “highs” that figure dropped to fifty-nine per cent. “It is disconcerting that, when asked about gun control, around half of those with higher conspiratorial predispositions wanted less strict gun laws,” Uscinski and Parent observe.

For more long-term data, they turned to newspapers. A battery of assistants sifted through more than a hundred years’ worth of letters to the editor published in the Times and in the Chicago Tribune. Letters that referred to any sort of group acting in secret “at the expense of the common good” were coded as “conspiracy talk.” (No effort was made to distinguish between “talk” about actual conspiracies, e.g., Watergate, and baseless speculation.) The groups denounced in such missives included the usual suspects—Catholics, Communists, Jews, the United Nations—as well as more surprising targets: ice companies, Lutheran newspapers, the Senate printing office, and the Prime Minister of Malta. The schemes, too, ranged all over the diabolical map, from Herbert Hoover’s secret business deals to bankrupt the U.S. to a C.I.A. plot to spread lesbianism.

When Uscinski and Parent tallied the number of conspiracy-coded letters published each year, they found no twenty-first-century surge in paranoid thinking. On the contrary, averaging out the short-term ups and downs, they conclude that the amount of “conspiracy talk” has remained constant since the nineteen-sixties and has actually declined since the eighteen-nineties: “We do not live in an age of conspiracy theories and have not for some time.” That we believe we do makes sense, since that sentiment, too, is a constant.

“It’s official: America is becoming a conspiratocracy,” the Daily News announced in 2011. “Are we living in a golden age of conspiracy theory?” the Boston Globe wondered in 2004. It’s the “dawn of a new age of conspiracy theory,” the Washington Post declared in 1994.

“Presumably we could multiply examples back to Salem in 1692, but you understand the point,” Uscinski and Parent write. “Conspiracy scares are ubiquitous.” According to their analysis, short-term variations in the rate of conspiracy theorizing do not coincide with changing economic conditions or advances in technology, like the Web.

Such is their take on “scares” that it’s hard to imagine them finding anything new in the “new conspiracism.” Still, when it comes to paranoia in high places, they share some of Muirhead and Rosenblum’s concerns. When there’s an uptick in conspiracy theorizing by members of the “élite”—defined as government officials, entertainers, and journalists—they observe a corresponding uptick in paranoid theorizing more generally. “This means you, Donald Trump,” they write.

In 2015, a young journalist named Anna Merlan took a cruise to Mexico. Most of the passengers on board the ship, the Ruby Princess, were ordinary vacationers, but a significant minority had signed on for a cruise-within-a-cruise, dubbed by its organizers Conspira-Sea. The Conspira-Sea crowd was treated to lectures from various “experts,” including Andrew Wakefield, the British doctor whose bogus studies launched the anti-vaxx movement. When Merlan returned to shore, she wrote a lighthearted feature about the experience, for the Web site Jezebel, in which she poked fun at the Conspira-Sea-ers for having lost touch with reality. Then Trump was elected and Edgar Welch showed up with his guns at Comet Ping Pong. Merlan decided that perhaps she was the one who was out of touch.

In “Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power,” Merlan immerses herself in various subcultures of suspicion. She visits a gathering of white nationalists in eastern Kentucky; attends the annual meeting of the Mutual U.F.O. Network, known as mufon; and hangs out with proponents of “redemption theory,” a strain of nuttiness based on the idea that every American is owed a cache of cash held secretly by the government. One of her first stops is a rally of Pizzagate diehards in Lafayette Park, not far from the White House. This takes place in March, 2017, three months after Welch’s arrest. Merlan finds the crowd split into factions, each convinced that the other is made up of plants. She’s interviewing a woman who wants to be known as LaLa when she notices a man filming them with his phone. The man accuses LaLa of belonging to the “controlled opposition.” He, in turn, is approached by other phone-wielding demonstrators and charged with working to undermine the cause.

“You’re protecting child molesters, bro,” someone yells at him. But who’s supposed to be doing the controlling or why is never quite clear. “It seems that the core element from everyone inside this ‘movement’ is distrust for everyone around them,” LaLa relates to Merlan. “Nobody knows who’s on whose side, or what the truth is.”

Merlan encounters this dynamic frequently. People who believe conspiracy theories, it turns out, often suspect others who believe such theories of being crazy, or worse. At the mufon conference, just outside Las Vegas, a speaker named Corey Goode, an eminent figure in the world of ufology, describes how, as a kid, he was taken to an underground facility at Carswell Air Force Base, in Texas, and trained to fight aliens. Later, Goode maintains, he roamed around the solar system doing “surveillance and recon,” until, finally, his government handlers performed “age regression” and sent him back home, once again as a child. Another U.F.O. researcher at the convention, Richard Dolan, tells Merlan he’s worried about claims like Goode’s, which “aren’t particularly credible.” Like the crowd in Lafayette Park, Dolan is concerned about plants, who he fears are out to undermine the whole ufology enterprise. History, he observes, is “replete with provocateurs and disinformation coming from U.S. government channels.”

Americans, as Merlan notes, have long suspected the government of suppressing the truth about extraterrestrials—such suspicions probably predate the term “extraterrestrial.” Other conspiracy theories, she observes, have even deeper roots. The charge of ritual child abuse, key to Pizzagate, was levelled against the Jews back in the Middle Ages. It has surfaced many times since, including during what’s become known as the Satanic Panic—a rash of allegations that sent more than twenty Californians to prison in the nineteen-eighties. (Virtually all the convictions have since been overturned.) Conspiracism, Merlan concludes, has “more or less always been with us”: pizza-parlor workers have simply replaced day-care workers, who replaced Jews.

But she also makes the opposite point. Like Muirhead and Rosenblum, Merlan believes that something novel and dangerous is going on right now. In her account, Trump gets a lot of the credit (or, if you prefer, the blame) and so, too, does the Internet. Merlan cites the Columbine shooting, which took place in 1999, “before the age of YouTube, easily buildable blogs, and widely used social media platforms.”After the shooting, no one came forward to propose that Columbine had been staged. Today, it is pretty much guaranteed that a mass shooting will give rise to a community on the Web that insists the victims are “crisis actors.” Merlan interviews Lenny Pozner, a former I.T. consultant whose six-year-old son, Noah, died in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, in 2012. Pozner has spent most of the past six years battling conspiracists who insist that the shooting never happened and that Noah never even existed. (In February, a Connecticut judge ordered Alex Jones, the owner of the Web site Infowars and a leading purveyor of the Sandy Hook-as-hoax theory, to sit for a deposition in a lawsuit brought by the parents of slain children. In the deposition, in March, Jones claimed that a “form of psychosis” had made him believe the massacre was staged.)

“This category of recent conspiracy theorists is really a global network of village idiots,” Pozner tells Merlan. “They would have never been able to find each other before, but now it’s this synergistic effect of the combination of all of them from all over the world. There are haters from Australia and Europe and they can all make a YouTube video in fifteen seconds.”

During the 2016 Presidential election, Zeynep Tufekci was watching tapes of Trump rallies when she noticed something odd. Tufekci, an associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and a self-described techno-sociologist, found that YouTube began cuing up for her videos filled with racist diatribes and Holocaust denials. She wondered what was going on, so she created another account and began watching clips of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. This time, she found herself directed to what she later described in the Times as “videos of a leftish conspiratorial cast,” including some that argued that the U.S. government was responsible for the attacks of September 11th.

Tufekci concluded that YouTube had decided that the best way to hold viewers’ attention was to push them toward more and more sensational material. The motive wasn’t political; it was commercial. And probably the scheme wasn’t the work of a cabal, or even a person, but of an algorithm. “What we are witnessing is the computational exploitation of a natural human desire: to look ‘behind the curtain,’ ” Tufekci wrote.

At a minimum, what’s new about the “new conspiracism” is the number of people exposed to it. If there’s a “natural human desire” to get at some hidden truth, it’s never been easier to indulge that desire—or to imagine doing so—via YouTube or Infowars or Twitter. It’s unclear how many of those who are led to posts on the “truth” about 9/11 or listen to Alex Jones or follow Trump’s tweets actually believe what they encounter, but only a tiny fraction can create a very big problem; after all, almost two billion people click on YouTube videos every month. In a tacit acknowledgment of responsibility, Pinterest blocked vaccine-related searches on its sites after measles outbreaks in several states this winter. Facebook, too, recently said that it would “reduce the ranking of groups or Pages that spread misinformation about vaccinations.” In January, without ever explaining how its “up next” algorithm works, YouTube announced that it would “begin reducing recommendations of borderline content,” including videos “making blatantly false claims about historic events like 9/11.”

Meanwhile, Pizzagate stumbles on. A couple of months ago, another man was arrested in connection with Comet Ping Pong—this one for setting fire to the place. ♦︎