Second Amendment. You might even point out that gun-rights advocates have been warning for eight years that President Obama planned such tyrannical measures in the imminent future—steps that never even came close to materializing. It won’t matter to them.
You can explain to them that the Federal Reserve is a heavily regulated entity that mostly watches over interest rates and the monetary supply. You might even try explaining that abandoning the gold standard in 1971 ensured the value of the dollar, but far-right conspiracists still claim that it resulted from a one-world-government plot. You can try, but they will dismiss you.
And so it goes for the rest of the universe inside of Alt-America. In more than a few respects its strange reversal of realities resembles that of Planet Bizarro, the square planet sometimes visited by Superman. Planet Bizarro almost always appeared purely for its humorous effect; likewise the notions promulgated by Alt-Americans are ripe fodder for people who want to make fun of them.
The beating heart of Alt-America, however, is the ancient drumbeat of white identity politics, a fear of nonwhite people who speak foreign languages and follow alien creeds. These people embody the Other: non- or sub-human beings whose presence is felt as a form of degradation. Good Alt-Americans loathe and fear this Other. That may be partly because race in this universe is essentially a zero-sum proposition: if one race gains in status or power, then another must lose concomitantly.
So when confronted with a discomfiting civil-rights movement like Black Lives Matter, they do not hear the message its name communicates clearly: “Black lives matter, and white people must stop acting as if they did not.” What racists hear instead is a zero-sum assertion: “Only black lives matter, and no one else’s.” Their reality is distorted by their inability to comprehend other people or have empathy for them.
The Alt-Americans view any attempts at parity in the value of a life as a direct threat to their own privileged position. And privileged they are: Even though whites are losing their long-standing ethnic dominance of American demographics, they have, through a combination of factors, maintained their powerfully privileged positions economically, politically, culturally, and especially within the law-enforcement and justice systems.
They are similarly impervious to the factual realities regarding immigration. You can demonstrate to them how immigrants actually pay large sums into the federal income-tax and Social Security systems through their paycheck deductions (while receiving few of the benefits of those taxes, since by law they are precluded from participating in most federal “welfare” programs), and in the end pay substantially more in taxes than they receive in benefits. You can explain to them that the primary reason there are so many undocumented immigrants outside the system is that the American economy generates hundreds of thousands of unskilled-labor jobs every year that businesses have difficulty filling because of their often difficult and unpleasant natures, and yet our immigration system, still awaiting comprehensive reform, only issues around 5,000 green cards annually to cover that labor. You can show them crime statistics proving that immigrants commit crime at a substantially lower rate than the general population, the white populace included.
Such information doesn’t make a dent. Alt-Americans will continue to believe that immigrants suck away their taxpaying dollars and bring crime and disease to the country and that we must erect a big wall to keep them out. They will continue to insist that Americans not only can fill those jobs, they need them. Latinos are displacing American workers, Alt-Americans believe, and the border is a national security risk—so immigration “reform” must wait until the border is secure. Immigration experts understand that this places the cart before the horse—that the border will never be secure until a sane policy that encourages legal immigration is in place.
Alt-America is largely the creation of an increasingly entrenched conspiracy industry that generates one theory after another about the truth that lies behind the public narrative generated in the mainstream media. These theories’ influence now reaches broadly into the mainstream itself. This conspiracism industry is composed mainly of a network of radio hosts and Internet entrepreneurs, who churn out a steady stream of New World Order plots and predictably Alt-American interpretations of daily news events. Alex Jones and his Infowars website are the best known of this group. Jones claims that a variety of global events, including the Boston Marathon bombing and the November 2014 Paris massacres, were in reality false flag operations carried out by agents of the New World Order.
It’s a self-contained universe. While this network often differs on the precise details of the conspiracies that populate Alt-America—sometimes resulting in vicious internecine bickering and “purity tests”—the overarching story and general nature of The Enemy is always the same: namely, some variation on the New World Order, or “globalists,” or any other term used to name the secretive cabal they believe is conspiring to rule mankind. This Alt-America universe has come to reflect most closely the far-right ideology of the Patriot-constitutionalist-militia movement.
The material this industry produces becomes grist for a hundred thousand conversations on Internet chat forums and on social media such as Facebook and Twitter. A horde of bloggers, homemade YouTube political preachers, and far-right ideologues echo and spread these theories. The volume and intensity of this material that’s been generated, especially since 2008, is genuinely astonishing. Equally astonishing is the extent to which you can find these ideas being increasingly voiced by ostensibly mainstream right-wing pundits on the radio and in media such as Fox News.
The material spreads readily. Any corner of the Alt-American universe can suffice to attract new believers who, sometimes in very short order, become wholesale subscribers to the many different facets of Alt-America. For example, a staple of the occupiers of the January 2016 Patriot takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge was that the Constitution doesn’t permit the federal government to own public lands outside of the District of Columbia. Someone who believes that may well start spouting other “constitutionalist” theories, such as that a county sheriff is the supreme law of the land, superior to federal authorities, and expressing fears that there is a plot to drive white men off the land and into the cities, to take away their guns and Second Amendment rights as well, and so on from there.
For Americans outside the Alt-America universe, “cockamamie” doesn’t begin to describe how such ideas sound when Alt-Americans begin spouting unintelligible lingo at them. Some may question the Alt-Americans’ sanity and their intelligence. Yet various studies and polls of subscribers to conspiracy theories and Patriot movement beliefs have shown that the majority of Alt-Americans are better educated than the average American and have incomes well above the median. Their beliefs and worldviews are frequently based on close readings of arcane documents (legal and otherwise); they also often possess an extraordinarily detailed knowledge of various putative “facts” that, on close examination, turn out not to be facts at all. Alt-Americans are neither stupid nor unlettered; what they are instead is oddly gullible, eager to absorb any “fact” if it supports their worldview, and insistent that people who believe official explanations or mainstream media narratives are the real gullible fools, or “sheeple,” as their lexicon prefers.
Alt-Americans share a set of personality traits that distinguish them from people who are less prone to join them, yet they simultaneously operate in the same universe as everyone else. This is why they are able to function perfectly well alongside the rest of us, why they seem so normal, even likable at times—until those moments when their world bangs up against ours and they attempt to assert their ideas.
The political scientist Eric Oliver of the University of Chicago argues that conspiracy theories are “simply another form of magical thinking,” Oliver explained in an interview. And as with all types of magical thinking, people engage in conspiracy theories in order to cope with difficult emotions. Usually this emotion is the apprehension that is triggered by an inexplicable or unusual event. In struggling to restore our emotional equilibrium, we search for patterns. In looking for patterns, we use mental shortcuts called heuristics. These heuristics include
