Ordinarily I reserve these kinds of meditations and reflections for after I’ve finished reading a book. This allows me time to contemplate the entire message and to draw examples from the whole text. I could apply this same approach to Sarah Kendzior’s They Knew: How A Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent, but doing that would have overloaded my thinking and led to a poor assessment — such a response does not do this project justice. Therefore, I will break this reading into multiple parts. This, I hope, will allow me to better process the material and find an outlet for the conflicting sentiments I have already faced a mere 75 pages in.

The book, as the subtitle suggests, focuses on the nature, causes and weaponization of conspiracy theories. Kendzior, however, is very careful to position the term, not in a pejorative or dismissive light, but rather as a response to and a product of a deteriorating social and political reality in the United States. It is not by accident that this book, as the author often reiterates, originated in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, a period that arguably sounded the death knell for responsible journalism, trust in government institutions and the American public’s ability to discern sound information from fantasy, all contributing factors to the nation’s “complacency”. During this period we suffered a relentless stream of disinformation, misinformation and uninformation fed to us from legacy media, social media and even the highest levels of government. The White House touted ivermectin, a relatively obscure antiparasitic drug more commonly prescribed by veterinarians than MDs, as a miracle drug; when the FDA, CDC and the vast majority of the medical profession pushed back saying there was no evidence to support the claims and the likelihood of dangerous side effects outweighed any potential benefit, the administration chalked it up to Deep State operatives working to suppress inexpensive and readily available cures in order to promote experimental and expensive therapies.

One of the most troubling things about this book is that reading it demonstrates how little has actually changed and yet how much has actually changed. Conspiracy theories are as powerful and readily available now as they were during the worst of the pandemic, but for me at least, it’s becoming harder and harder to delineate and separate the possible from the unlikely — I feel more and more like I’m a character in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and that there are no impossibilities, merely varying degrees of improbability. Yes, it is possible Jeffrey Epstein hung himself in a New York jail cell while guards and surveillance systems were unaware and malfunctioning — that is the official determination. However, if we are honest with ourselves, it is also possible he had some assistance. There is no shortage of powerful and wealthy individuals who could have sponsored Epstein’s trip to the afterlife (the Clintons are often named as possible culprits, but the man occupying the White House at the time, arguably, had as much motive and significantly more opportunity).

This becomes the problem of conspiracy theories: we are all aware that there are horrible, sneaky, vile and illegal things going on all around us all the time. Usually, those crimes do not directly involve us, but, every once in a while, you come up against the Jeffrey Epsteins of the world, people whose crimes are so public, so well documented and involve so many powerful and influential people that it becomes impossible to pretend it’s not real. When facing a situation like this, we have one of three options available to us: 1) ignore the problem as much as possible and carry on with our lives as much as possible, 2) try and expose the seedy underbelly and fight an arduous, thankless and possibly dangerous for justice or 3) allow the despair to consume us and yield to l’appel du vide. Most of the time we seem to choose the first option as granting any credence to the conspiracy theory (i.e. the unofficial narrative) means accepting that we exist in a powerless and vulnerable space and that access to wealth and power insulates even the most repugnant scum of the Earth from anything approaching accountability. To some extent we acknowledge that reality, but acknowledgment is not the same as full realization. Being real is knowing that people die in untimely ways all the time. Being aware is allowing for the possibility that a Boeing whistleblower with insight into structural failures dying of a drug-resistant infection only a few months after another Boeing whistleblower with insight into structural failures died from a reportedly self-inflicted gunshot might not be coincidental.

This is the challenge Kendzior presents to her readers: don’t be so quick to write off ‘conspiracy theories’ as the fantastical delusions of sad and crazy people. This is not an easy challenge to accept — there are tremendous social, political and economic risks involved with even bringing up the possibilities offered by the maligned conspiracy theories and these are risks most ‘mainstream’ people are unwilling to take. We’re supposed to be in a free country that is run by fundamentally decent citizens who have the best interests of the electorate at heart. However, we have been shown time and again, by members of all political affiliations, this is the dream part of the American Dream. We’re supposed to trust that we live in a country where laws are written to protect the wronged and that the enforcement of those laws is universal. However, we are shown frequently that laws are selectively enforced and that sending hundreds of thousands of American troops to Central Asia based upon a pile of lies earns you a presidential library and a second term while killing a single health insurance CEO earns you a massive manhunt and a personal escort to jail by the mayor of New York City flanked by commandos from every law enforcement agency imaginable.

They Knew was published halfway through the Biden presidency and there is, at least so far, no hint of the second Trump administration. Kendzior does, however, talk at length about how the fact Donald Trump managed to avoid prison (to say nothing of getting elected in 2016) clearly suggests the existence of some manner of ‘deep state’ that operates in the shadows, keeping the rich and powerful safe from prosecution and even going so far as to make selfless heroes of the most demonstrably hedonistic people on the planet. How else can a thrice married, big-business, New York elitist with multiple credible allegations of sexual harassment be heralded as a champion of small-town, middle class family values — not once but twice? How else can someone stoke a rhetorical fire so large it threatens to burn down the US Capitol and still waltz back into the District of Columbia four years later and once again promise to defend a constitution he has repeatedly used to metaphorically line his trashcan?

One of the most telling examples of how far the country has slid towards oligarchy, despotism or whatever post-Truth hellscape awaits us, was the example of Bob Woodard. “[I]n a distant era when exposure facilitated accountability”, Bob Woodard was a journalist who, along with Carl Bernstein, brought to light the role the Nixon administration (and, ultimately, the president himself) played in the Watergate crimes [26]. This was in the 1970s when, according to history, newspapers still functioned as the mythical “fourth estate”, a force that could be leveraged to help keep politicians, if not honest, at least subject to some kind of meaningful public scrutiny. Fast forward to 2020 and we have this supposed standard bearer of journalistic integrity sitting across from President Donald Trump — he is being told things about the government’s pandemic response that did not match its public declarations. The Woodard of 1972 would have likely taken this information and began building a report. Instead, he remains quiet and uses the information for a book released months later at the start of the COVID Winter [26]. This shift away from journalistic integrity is not entirely surprising as media outlets have become increasingly cautious about ruffling too many feathers for fear of financial backlash — Woodard’s own Washington Post has been largely controlled by Jeff Bezos’s Nash Holdings since 2013 and has recently faced accusations of stifling reporting Bezos finds undesirable. If the man who brought down one corrupt president can’t be trusted to bring down a new and arguably more dangerous one, who or what can we trust?

That is the answer I expect the book will seek going forward. I doubt, however, there will be a clear answer. In part we have to rely on our own sense of right and wrong, trustworthy and untrustworthy, elucidating and deceptive because the incorporated media and the milquetoast Congress certainly won’t help bring us back from the brink. But it’s not just a matter of “do your own research” because if 98% of information is supposedly produced by the ‘deep state’, why should we believe the remaining 2% isn’t produced by some other nefarious entity? This is the legacy of the first Trump presidency that has continued unabated through Biden’s and into Trump II: undermine the credibility of everything and everyone so that there is no locus of truth, no established authority, nowhere to look for guidance. A confused herd is an easy target for a powerful wolf in sheep’s clothing and can easily be led into its den and devoured.