On Conspiracy Theories

I had a great deal of fun researching, and gave myself a serious anxiety spiral writing, this essay for Hedgehog Review about conspiracy theories — the theories and the concept itself. It’s un-paywalled today.

I used terms like “conspiracy theory” and “conspiracy theorists,” which are not beloved terms, obviously, among the people who belong to this community. (Many of them point to the role of the government in popularizing and stigmatizing the terms during the rollout of the Warren Commission Report, which is real, although one of my sources indicates that the terms were already in use before that. I glance at this line of thought late in the essay, when I take up one of the standard recent academic works on “conspiracy theory” and find it to be bullshit.) I did so largely because all the alternatives — “parapolitics,” “deep politics,” the “Kennedy research community,” etc. — smell of euphemism. I don’t think there’s any dishonor in suspecting that some of the things that happen in the world are the product of secret plots, if you can make a good argument.

For every theory that I investigated, I tried to be as open-minded as possible; I felt that I needed to risk adopting views that would make me sound crazy to other people — to my friends at Hedgehog, for example. Since I am already pretty open to the idea that the CIA did JFK, and that there are so many anomalies surrounding Manson that they start to cancel each other out, that Gladio was probably more than just a handful of weapons caches, and that whatever Epstein was up to it implicates more than we’ve seen, and … anyway, you get the idea, this meant looking into some pretty fringe stuff. In a lot of cases, I learned at least one thing that spooked me. This sentence is autobiographical: “Occasionally you remember the eeriness of those months, the sense that a heap of facts had come to life, had opened its eyes and glared at you with intention.” I refer several times in the essay to the David McGowan thesis that, essentially, the government is operating a kind of mass-scale Murder Incorporated and that most serial killers are products of this. I found a lot of his argument silly to begin with and the rest of it tended not to pan out. (At one point he asserts that one of the members of the LaBianca family was a major local player in the drug trade. I couldn’t find another reference for this anywhere!) But the fact that George W. Bush, as governor of Texas, commuted Henry Lee Lucas’s death sentence: that was weird, right? W supposedly did so because Lucas, a man of … severely limited intelligence and impaired common sense, had wildly over-confessed to his captors and probably wasn’t present at one of the murders that the state had emphasized in its case against him. When has George W. Bush ever shown mercy to someone because facts, logic, and law required him to? Certainly Henry Lee Lucas, who was allowed to die in prison rather than facing the death penalty, is the only Texas death-row prisoner who can boast of George W’s kindness and good sense. W, with his enthusiasm for the death penalty, was running a perfectly legal Murder Inc of his own at the time.

McGowan thinks that Bush’s anomalous behavior here — and it really is anomalous — is a thank-you to Henry for, essentially, not talking. Because W and his father, the former President/CIA chief, would have been very involved in the contract-killer-reserve-pool/satanic cult/etc. that McGowan alleges to have existed, and Lucas could have disclosed their roles in it, but he didn’t. So W let him die in peace. (At least I think this is what McGowan is alleging; he argues so often by ellipsis and implication and tone and by a kind of implied-sarcastic-wiggled-eyebrow-can-you-believe-this effect that it’s sometimes hard to know what the fuck he’s saying.)

The official story seems unbelievable. But McGowan’s unofficial story is crazier. If Lucas has that good of a bargaining chip to work with, why on earth does he die in prison at all? And wouldn’t some of the others on George W’s expedite-the-death-penalty kill list also be “serial killers,” which for McGowan definitely means “government employees,” and wouldn’t they then be able to induce W to give them the same favors? None of them did. That man did not sign clemency petitions.

I think what really put me off of the harder-core conspiracist writers, though, was that they’re all basically true-crime junkies, and as it happens I mistrust true-crime junkies. I found myself listening to a podcast where a well-regarded guy who considers himself a leftist was hellbent on proving to the rest of us that the West Memphis Three, or at least one of them, belong in jail after all — because those guys are weird and witchy and that proves that they are child murderers. If you hang out in these circles you eventually discover that lots of self-proclaimed leftists think that the Satanic child-raping ring panic of the 1980s was basically real, that there really were tunnels under that preschool, etc. “Sooner or later these people are going to talk themselves into thinking that the victims of the Salem witch trials had it coming,” I said to myself, and then I came upon a podcast series arguing exactly that. (I also found that these writers tended to do the same thing to each other, seizing on painful facts in each other’s lives to prove that their rivals are ops. One guy used the fact that a rival podcaster was, as a teenager, kidnapped and held by one of those “troubled teen” operations as proof that that guy was still working for Syanon. And it goes without saying that if you go part of the way with them but don’t embrace their most grandiose or unlikely arguments, they’ll imply you’re working for Them.)

This kind of thing makes me mad because it’s Prosecutor Brain, and Prosecutor Brain can make anybody guilty. Try it. Choose someone you love, and list only the facts about that person that might look bad to a hostile stranger. Pretty soon you have a picture of a remorseless psychopath whose good qualities are mere cover-story. This is a sick thing to sit around doing to strangers who have already suffered the hostile attentions of the local DA, the press, and in some cases a warden as well. I don’t trust people who find this an appealing way to spend their time.