The FRONTLINE Interviews

Nancy Rosenblum

Professor and Author

Nancy Rosenblum is a professor of ethics in politics and government at Harvard University, and the co-author of A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy.

Following are excerpts of an interview conducted by FRONTLINE filmmaker Michael Kirk on March 11, 2020. They have been edited for clarity.

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Nancy Rosenblum

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Help me with understanding … how you would define, how you would think about what I call old conspiracy theory.

Well, classic conspiracy theory is a theory.It’s an attempt to explain an event, and it says that things are not as they seem, right?And you explain it by picking up the dots, forming a pattern and showing that that pattern indicates malignant intent by powerful people acting covertly.That’s what a conspiracy theory is.And I think it’s important to say at the very outset that sometimes the dots and evidence are warranted, and sometimes the conspiracy theories are true, so to define them all as fabulist or to define them all, even the political ones, as destructive of democracy I think is a mistake.There have been conspiracy theories, like during the Progressive Era, that were very constructive.They looked at smoke-filled rooms that chose presidential candidates and corporate board rooms, and they instituted democratic reforms like the primary election and so on.

Who is the audience?Who is receptive to a conspiracy theorist?

There’s an awful lot of political psychology on this: Who are the believers?And I think the best studies show that anyone and everyone can be a believer in some conspiracy theory.… So it’s not a peculiar population.

The question is whether Alex Jones’ audience is a cross-section of the population, and that seems not to be the case, that is, that they are people who are interested in extremist things, they are people who are interested in truly malignant plots, and they're people who are ready to take his word for these things rather than the sort of scrupulous, scholarly evidence and argument that we see even in wild conspiracy theories like the Kennedy assassination or 9/11.

That is, if you go to Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth [a group supporting an unproven and discredited conspiracy theory behind the attack], they’re like scholars, right?"Here’s the temperature of jet fuel.Here is why it couldn’t have brought the buildings down.Here is why there weren’t really any planes at all, they were only holograms."I mean, these are pseudoscientific, maybe scientific, account of things.Alex Jones doesn’t do that.

What does he do?

He makes assertions.And people will feed him —and this happens on the internet especially —evidence behind what he does.And he will embellish them.But he doesn’t start with a conspiracy theory as an explanation.He starts with an assertion.

Is there a sort of trope, an automatic heart and soul of a conspiracy, that has always existed?

Well, we know, yes, and we know that there are things about the human mind that find this attractive, which is why conspiracism or conspiracy theory is so widespread.And I think there are two, essential elements to this, to thinking that an event is explained by conspiracy theory, or, even, it’s the whole motor of history, right?And one is the rejection of the idea that things happen by chance, that there are unintended consequences.When something that you think is significant happens, there’s an intention behind it.And when it’s a negative thing, there’s a malignant intention behind it.

And the other sort of characteristic of all of this is a notion of proportionality.When something significant happens, it has to have a cause proportionate to the significant thing that’s happening.So, a lone gunman couldn’t have killed President Kennedy.Right?This was too historically important for somebody, you know, in a building with a rifle to assassinate a president.And in the same way, 9/11 couldn’t have been 16 or 17 men hiding out in some remote corner of Afghanistan, right, plotting this thing and bringing down the World Trade Center and starting off a set of wars.It had to have been something else, the CIA or the Jews.I mean, there are left and right explanations of it.But there had to have been more, a proportionality between the event and the cause.

What draws Trump to Jones, do you figure?Is he a conspiracist himself?

Trump?He’s an absolute conspiracist.That is, his —

Even at that time.

I think he has always been.He has always been.This is a man who psychologically sees the world in terms of how he needs the world to be. …And one of the characteristics of how he sees the world is in terms of loyal friends and enemies. …

[What does it mean that conspiracy theories are so prominent today?]

… I think there is a monumental national effect, which is that it creates a kind of polarization in the population that’s much deeper than partisan polarization, even if you think it mainly falls along partisan lines.It’s a polarization about what it means to know something.And this is a very deep, what we call an epistemological divide.And there’s no breaching that divide.There's no bridge between those people who reason in terms of evidence and argument and communities of belief that depend upon the notion of self-correction and new evidence, right, and those who don’t.

…We see it with the viruses now, right?But when it happens at the center of political life, it makes, in a sense, politics impossible.So it’s not only the partisan polarization that paralyzes politics in a way, it’s also this deep polarization about what it means to know something. …

What does that tell you, Nancy?

It tells me the conspiracism has become a recognized and accepted way of exercising political power and that even people who themselves might be averse to it, don’t have an appetite for it, are willing to indulge it for political purposes.And it makes me very worried, because while I think that if Trump loses the next election, we’re going to —conspiracism is going to lose a lot, right?It won’t have the Oval Office and the ability to inflict a compromised sense of reality on the nation, especially in the way of destroying institutions.

But it is now recognized as a means of exercising power, and I think it will be hard to resist.I think it’s likely to spread across the political spectrum.And whether it returns to the fringes or not I think will depend on whether people in office can resist using it.

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