The Deep State! It was funny for a little while...

That photo above was from when I was a guest on the Three Profs and a Pitcher podcast.

It was a bright moment before the dark times, before the end of SJC. We talked about conspiracy theories and the people who believe in them. I spoke extensively on the subject of Dulce, which was occupying my writing and research time, again before the fall of SJC and my change in thesis direction. In a tongue-in-cheek gesture we donned, as you can see, tinfoil hats to block out the signals supposedly being beamed into our brains by the government or the aliens or whoever. A good time was had by all and as I have for many years, I enjoyed discussing conspiracy theory through the prism of rhetoric and narrative construction.

Lately, I've been thinking about the more dangerous side of conspiracy theories...and I'm troubled.

In recent weeks, more than one person has told me the same story and both did so with all earnestness and sincerity. These were intelligent, decently-educated people. Their vision of the world  goes something like this:

"There is a globalist cabal secretly orchestrating a New World Order. Aiding in these efforts are a 'Deep State'--a US government within the US government--journalists (or the more derisive "MSM"), scientists, and higher education. Along with the Moose Lodge, this vast conspiracy is keeping alien contact a secret from the public at-large. But they can't for much longer. Disclosure is coming..."

Okay, so I made up the part about the Moose Lodge, but there's still so much to unpack in that claim.

Normally, I'd love it. It has all the narrative elements of what makes James Bond and The X-Files so good. It's also understandable why someone might think these otherwise outlandish things. This world is an unfair and unkind place where bad things often happen for no reason. Or there may be a reason, but you are powerless in the face of it. Believing that happenings are secretly organized against you, or even the whole public at-large, begins to make a kind of sense. After a time, one may even feel a sense of comfort in it. It's a form of screaming back into the dark, impenetrable void of the absurdity of existence. Of course things aren't working out. "They" are all against you. There is a populism in such a philosophy.

No one embraces populism more than Donald Trump. He has even openly claimed that there is a "Deep State", mostly composed of the intelligence-gathering apparatuses of the government, working against him. Last year at this time, Senator Ron Johnson, the Senate Homeland Security Committee chairman mind you, went on Fox News and alerted all Americans that a "secret society" that includes the FBI is lurking about.

The problem of course is that this is beyond impractical. Political scientist Joseph Uscinski is an academic (oh no!) who has spent considerable time studying conspiracy theories and why the vast majority are implausible. Here's a mental activity to help illustrate just why that is.

Think of your favorite rock band. Got them in mind? Good.
Now, are they still together? If they are still together, are they still the original line up of members? Unless you are thinking of U2 or another rarity, the answer to one of those questions is very likely "no." That's because people can't seem to work together for extended periods of time. Eventually, differences in philosophy and personality cause paths to diverge. Same goes for government as people regularly leave administrations. The current administration appears to excel at this very phenomenon.

Point being, the so-called "Deep State" would require an enormous amount of people to perpetuate. In time, someone or more likely multiple someones, would walk away and talk. Dr. David Grimes is a physicist at Oxford University (oh no!) who mathematically computed just how long it would take for most conspiracy theories to unravel due to the amount of people involved. For example: Moon landing hoax? 3.7 years. There's secretly a cure for cancer? 3.2 years. 

Despite this reasoning, we have a president and a senior member of the Senate promulgating claims of "secret societies" and "the Deep State", claims few, if any, political leaders would previously have made. When conspiracy theory is passed off as fact by high-ranking officials, I tend to see a problem.

This problem is compounded by the denunciation of journalism, or "the MSM" the conspiracy adherents term it, as "enemies of the people." That's how we end up with people like Robert Chain.

Chain was arrested by the FBI and charged with threatening journalists at The Boston Globe, leaving voicemail messages such as "You're the enemy of the people, and we're going to kill every f-king one of you. Why don't you call Mueller, maybe he can help you out."

Journalists. Scientists. Academics. The FBI. Those who work in those disciplines and organizations are among the most fact-driven people in our society. To be skeptical and look for bias is one thing. Any student of rhetoric will tell you that no writing or communication of any kind is possible without at least the smallest taint of bias. To accuse them of collusion in specious conspiracies and label them as "enemies of the people" however, can obviously have dangerous consequences. While I do try to avoid Godwin's Law and agrumentum ad Hitlerum, I can't help but see parallels between these claims and the "stabbed in the back" myth. Yes, I just linked to Wikipedia, which I also don't like to do, but it has a political cartoon from the 1930s which brings the subject into vivid clarity.

This conspiracy theory stated that Germany lost World War I not because of the Allies' superior military prowess, but because of sabotage at home by Jews and other treasonous undesirables. Nazis were able to implement this falsehood to stir up populist fervor and lead people to do unspeakable things. Bear in mind that Nazi leadership also believed in the Hollow Earth conspiracy. What then was Nazism if not a conspiracy theory run loose to a point where it swept up a nation and millions died?

No, we're not there yet. I think I'd like to avoid it just the same, though.

The milder aspect of the worldview presented to me is that of "alien disclosure."

It's obviously no secret I have a strong interest in UFOs. This interest stems mainly from my fascination with how people construct narratives and rhetorical meaning out of the phenomenon. While I am quite skeptical, I still see a small percentage of cases, maybe around 4%, that have no easy explanation and that may indeed require an answer with extraordinary implications. The extraterrestrial hypothesis is one of those possible implications, but I see it as a remote one.

To paraphrase my would-be television alter-ego: "I want to believe...but hard evidence has proven elusive."

Since life has knocked me from my high horse plenty of times in recent years, I have stopped mocking people if they do happen to be UFO "true believers." You never know what's going on in someone's life and that hobby or interest you find laughable might just be the only thing keeping them glued together. Derision is not only unnecessary, it's just plain unkind.

In fact, it might be something in the same vein as mocking someone's religion. I would be far from the first to compare UFOs with religion. Many who have had sightings or other experiences with UFOs are said to come away with a profound spiritual awakening. This is understandable. Their experience, even if probably explainable through any number of prosaic occurrences, has given them a glimpse of "the other." They received a taste of the ethereal, something fantastic, a connection to something greater than our humdrum lives and something that might just give meaning to our otherwise absurd and random existence.

Doesn't that sound like religion?

For years in Catholic mass, I spoke the words, "And He shall come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and His Kingdom shall have no end." Is that or "the rapture" really any different than UFO enthusiasts crying, "One day there will be Disclosure and the 'space people' will show up, twinkle their little almond eyes, and everything will be fine"?

Most of the time it's a harmless enough "religious" belief, except in cases such as the Heaven's Gate cult. I've noticed however, how often UFO enthusiasts are also proponents of New World Order, Illuminati, Deep State conspiracy theories. Michael Barkun of Syracuse University (oh no!) has even likened this substrata of UFO enthusiast to fundamentalist religious zealots. It's a sort of "populist intellectualism." What happens, however, if these beliefs, such as "the Deep State", are granted validation from authority figures? Then the day the UFO devotee wants most, the day of Disclosure, is kept barricaded from them by secret societies, with the "MSM" and science itself complicit in the act. Therefore, shun all "mainstream media" and instead stay informed by some guy blogging out of his basement, with none of the text given peer review or even editorial scrutiny.

(Note: I am fully aware of the irony of my having just written that in a blog post, but I certainly don't try to pass myself off as harboring any "secret truth." No "files on the secret space program" around here.)

That, I believe, is a cocktail for an even deeper populist anti-intellectualism in this nation, a misplaced distrust of several of its most necessary institutions, and perhaps consequences far more horrendous than any of that.

Naturally, the conspiracy counterargument to all I have written might be a derisory cry that I'm "an ivory tower egghead" who has been "brainwashed by the MSM" in a "liberal indoctrination camp" (read "university") and that I'm "just one of the sheeple."

Given the alternative and its dark potential, I can live with that.


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