Are There Conspiracy Theories in an Autocracy?

Corners of the internet thought Donald Trump was dead or dying this weekend. He is not dead — they sent him out to be photographed driving to a golf outing. And while he did not look well, he is alive, absent some amazing special effects. Most people played the rumors for a joke, but some got very, very angry. People should not, the angry ones complained, indulge in conspiracy theories. Well, under the current circumstances, I have to ask: why not?

Conspiracy theories have a bad reputation. This is often because they are portrayed as all belonging to the lizard people are running the government variety. But that is not the only kind of so-called conspiracy theory that exists. Take project 2025, for example.

Project 2025 was a plan to gut the US government, especially those areas that would provide a check on presidential power and regulate businesses for the common good. It was revealed during the campaign, having been sponsored by one of the wealthiest and most prominent right-wing think tanks and counted among its authors several people with ties to the previous Trump admin or his various campaigns. They lied about the plan being connected to Trump, aided by the press, but the minute he won the election, they crowed that they intended to implement it and then they, well, tried to implement it. This was knowable to anyone who could see the connections between the various parties. But seeing connections that people do not admit to is often described as a conspiracy theory. And thus, it can be dismissed.

There are two significant problems with this in our fallen age. The first is that coordination does happen, all the time. ALEC really does push legislation in multiple states in order to advance their collective business interests. The tobacco companies really did engage in years and years of misinformation around the dangers of smoking. Oil companies really did something similar around climate change. And conservatives really did create Project 2025 as a template for governing. Pretending that reasonable discussion of powerful people and organizations collaborating is the same as warning about the lizard people is disingenuous at best.

The second, and perhaps larger problem, is that we cannot trust anything that comes out of this Administration. They lie all the time, arguably more than any administration in history, and they do things like fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and replace them with a crony the moment the unemployment figures run counter to their preferred narratives. No one can trust a thing they say.

By the weekend, Trump hadn’t been seen in public since Tuesday and had nothing on the public calendar through the Labor Day weekend. He had an admitted problem with his veins, has been in obvious mental decline for some time, and his last public appearance tried to hide bruising on his hands. If this had been Obama or Bush, people would have generally accepted that the President just didn’t have anything on his schedule and was generally fine (if this had been Biden, the New York Times would have been screaming about the Democrats covering up his funeral). But given the complete lack of honesty about, well, anything from this administration, speculation was reasonable.

We like to pretend that the world is simple, that if we just have a couple of easy-to-use heuristics, like all talk of coordination is a conspiracy theory and all conspiracy theories are nuts, everything will be clear. The world is not simple. JFK was killed by a lone gunman not because powerful people never coordinate (the CIA of the time, for example, absolutely tried to work with opponents of Castro to assassinate him), but because there is zero evidence that anyone else was involved. Not all stories of coordination are by themselves dismissible. Especially in autocracy. Such governments are dedicated to controlling the reality and thus it is not possible to react to them using normal heuristics. The talk of Trump’s death or serious illness was not a ridiculous theory — it was a reasonable attempt to divine the truth in a truth-less environment.

Dictators and wanna be dictators lie. About everything. We cannot continue to pretend that we work in a normal, functioning information environment. Trying to determine what is actually going on is not indulging in conspiracy theories, not if the attempts are based in evidence. They are a necessary, if unfortunate, byproduct of the attempts to hide the truth, any truth. Conspiracy theories can be a defense against the bullshit that now dominates our lives.

The lizard people still don’t run the government, though.