The Millipede

 Listening on a recent road trip to the audio version of Andy Kroll's A Death on W Street—a book detailing the bogus right-wing conspiracy theories that swarmed around the 2016 murder of Seth Rich and the effect they had on his family and friends—I went through a series of emotions. First: disbelief. These theories are easily refutable, as Kroll demonstrates. How was it that they were allowed to fester with so little factual grounding? It can't be! 

But then, once one has processed this emotion, another realization comes in its wake. Of course these theories became popular. There's nothing simpler in the world. Kroll in one section of the book reviews some of the reasons scholars most commonly give for the appeal of conspiracy theories, before concluding that none of them is quite satisfactory. Perhaps the real explanation is simpler and more common to all humanity than we wish to believe: the basic love of mystery. The sense of seeing secrets revealed. Who isn't drawn to that?

Do we not, after all, all crave the feeling that we are solving a mystery? Or that something once secret is now being specially revealed to us? It's the same hit of dopamine we get from opening a legitimate newspaper and seeing the words "scoop" or "exclusive," and knowing that some once-hidden knowledge is now about to be laid before us. Actual journalists just need to work harder to deliver this sensation, since they don't have the permission the conspiracists grant themselves to make things up as they go along. Trafficking in truth requires a lot more reportorial legwork than simply speculating and inventing to one's heart's content. 

One realizes, then, that the truth is at a profound disadvantage from the start, in its contest with bogus conspiracy theories. It simply can't deliver as much fun—as much of that straight dopamine hit—as quickly and as plentifully and as inexhaustibly as unbridled conspiracism. In a sense, therefore, it doesn't matter how thoroughly one can debunk a conspiracy theory, or how many facts one has on one's side. The truth will always be less powerful, because less appealing. 

And if this is the case, then an evil thought begins to form in one's mind. If truth is really powerless in the face of this deep-seated human craving for mystery, excitement, and occult knowledge, could we perhaps... try fighting with a weapon other than truth? Could we instead fight fire with fire? Why, after all, should the right monopolize this potent force of conspiracism? Is there some way we could grapple and harness it to our own ends? (I'm not actually recommending this, but let's game it out for the sake of venting some idle frustration.)

Of course, the left has conspiracy theories of its own. And the biography of a Trump has enough decades of shady dealings—ties to organized crime, a visit to Moscow, etc.—to provide grist to the mill of any would-be liberal conspiracist. But theories on these topics are already so closely associated with the Democratic fold that they are unlikely to reach the unconverted. And the details of Trump's biography that seem most to lend themselves to the conspiracist mentality (such as his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein) have already been assimilated into the structure of theories like QAnon. They can, after all, simply be reinterpreted as evidence that Trump must have been working "from within" all along to bring down the elite conspiracy. 

Plainly, therefore, to drive a wedge into the right, a conspiracy theory would have to partake of the right-wing mentality itself. It would need to accept as a given the pro-Trump, MAGA priors of its presumptive audience. It would need to cast Trump personally in a heroic light. But, if this must be treated as given, how could the theory be used to undermine the Trumpist cause? 

There is in fact a way, improbable as it may seem. We might take inspiration from the whimsical plot of André Gide's novel Lafcadio's Adventures (Les caves du Vatican under its original French title), which hinges on a conspiracy theory that accomplishes exactly this seeming impossibility. 

In Gide's novel, a set of con artists undertake to bamboozle the reactionary Catholics of France by exploiting an inconsistency in their thought. At the time the novel is set, the 1890s, Pope Leo XIII had recently published an encyclical recognizing the legitimacy of the French Third Republic. To conservative French Catholics, this posed a dilemma amounting almost to a contradiction in terms: as Ultramontanists, they needed to respect papal authority. But as conservative Catholics, they also loathed and rejected the anticlerical republican government, and still prayed for the eventual return of the monarchy. How could this be resolved?

The con artists in Gide's tale (based, apparently, on a real pamphlet that circulated in some right-wing circles at the time) offer a way out of the paradox. Fear not, they tell the conservative Catholics: the Leo XIII who issued that encyclical was in fact an imposter. The real Leo XIII would never set his name to such an abominable concession to atheistical republicanism. But he had been kidnapped, they claimed, by wicked Freemasons, and was being held in powerless captivity while a fraudulent usurper used his name and authority to issue proclamations against his wishes. 

In reading of this ingenious con (the architects of which—in Gide's novel—refer to themselves as "the Millipede"—an eerie coincidence, since the pro-Trump promulgators of the Seth Rich conspiracy theory more than a century later referred to themselves as "centipedes"), I was instantly reminded of something a friend once spitballed to me years earlier. When we were watching the absurdly entertaining 1990s John Woo action movie Face/Off, in which—famously—the Nicholas Cage and John Travolta characters trade faces with one another—my friend said: "This would be the perfect conspiracy theory to use against Trump."

Trump supporters, after all, face something of the same crisis in their ideology as the conservative French Catholics of the 1890s. On the one hand, Trump is their "god-emperor." He can do no wrong. Yet, on certain key issues, the MAGA movement has already gone even farther off the ideological rails than their progenitor. Trump, for instance, got vaccinated; he even promoted his funding of vaccine development as an achievement of his administration. His followers categorically reject such a concession to mainstream canons of scientific truth. 

Then there is the fact that Trump proved ultimately so powerless in the 2020 election. How were they to explain that? Here, the believers in the QAnon conspiracy theory faced something of a classic When Prophecy Fails scenario. The election came and went without Trump winning or doing any of the things their theory predicted. He did not arrest all the Democrats and "deep state elites" and deport them to Guantanamo. He did not unmask any conspiracy. His failure is impossible to reconcile to the ingenious foresight, planning, and long-term interests they attributed to him. How to overcome such a paradox in their thought without being overwhelmed with cognitive dissonance? 

An updated version of Gide's "Millipede" might offer them a way out: the "imposter" solution. This was also, in essence, what my friend was proposing with his Face/Off idea: suppose someone could forward the idea that the man currently going by the name Donald Trump is not the real Trump. At some point in 2020, we could say, Trump and Biden traded bodies. Their faces were swapped in John Woo fashion. This would explain to the MAGA supporters why their "god-emperor" favored vaccine development in late 2020 and went on to lose the election: it wasn't the real Trump!... Certainly as a conspiracy theory it's no more absurd than what the Q-pilled Trumpists already believe. And it would enable them to reconcile a current inconsistency in their worldview. 

This is all good fun to contemplate. One imagines that it might provide a way to sow dissension in the MAGA ranks by giving them a taste of their own medicine. But as soon as one contemplates it further, one realizes it would be a bad idea—not only on moral grounds, but on prudential ones as well. For one thing, trying to outflank Trump from the right creates the very real risk of throwing up someone even worse and more extreme in his place. If the MAGA movement turns on Trump because they think he's an imposter who has been surgically replaced with a Trump look-alike, why would we think that whoever they cast their lot with next would be better? 

Then there's the ever-present danger that people will really believe this stuff—and not just believe it as a sort of half-conscious game, with some pretense of conviction but always an undergirding sense of reality—but rather as the literal truth. 

This, ultimately, is what creates difficulty for the "Millipede" of Gide's novel as well. They have a good con going so long as they can hoodwink some wealthy conservatives into forking over donations. After all, they are only doing this—like so many influencers in the MAGA-sphere—as a grift. They just wanted the money. 

The peril for them (and for the rest of us) is when someone decides to act on the conspiracy theory with means other than bank transfers. In Gide's novel, this happens when a slow-witted manufacturer of plaster for religious statuary gets wind of the "imposter" conspiracy theory. He decides that it must be his duty to personally travel to Rome on a sort of anti-Masonic crusade, to try to break the true Pope out of his unjust imprisonment. He thus becomes the fictional counterpart to such all-too-real individuals as the man who opened fire in the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in 2016, because he believed the conspiracy theories linking it to an elite-sponsored human trafficking ring must be literally true. 

We unfortunately live in a world where no theory is too grotesque or absurd that it could reliably be taken as a joke. As fun as it may be to contemplate in the abstract the thought of turning the power of conspiracy theories against their makers, doing so in practice would go about as well as most other real-world attempts to fight fire with fire. Far better, at last, to try the boring and obvious, but still vital strategy: fighting fire with water.