"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 71

In this episode: There’s a Conspiracy Theory for Just About Everything, So Should You Be Worried?

October 8, 2024

"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 71

Episode 71: There’s a Conspiracy Theory for Just About Everything, So Should You Be Worried?

The moon landing was faked; 9/11 was an inside job — conspiracy theories like these seem to surround most major events now, even when the facts have been well established for years. These beliefs make plenty of headlines. There have also been some high profile cases of violence being committed by people espousing conspiracy theories. So why do people believe in conspiracy theories and when do they actually pose a threat?

Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.

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Back around 2016, David Morrill found himself spending a lot of time on the internet — dabbling as he puts it — around the edges of QAnon conspiracies…and working on solving secret codes and puzzles he found mainly on Reddit. It was usually late at night.

David Morrill: Everybody else would be asleep, and then it was just me, myself, and I being able to explore. To paint a picture in your mind's eye, it was literally in a dark basement, but it was a very futuristic basement. I had at least three monitors at the time, one of them was at least 40 inches, I had all sorts of tabs open, boatloads of information channeling across the screen.

He'd go on Reddit and he’d scroll through what he calls the average humdrum stuff — jokes or memes. But then sometimes there’d be a comment or somebody who'd want to engage with him.

He’d fish through their content — often following one hyperlink, then another, until he ended up in some kind of strange community of people who were also working to solve these puzzles and anagrams that would supposedly reveal some kind of hidden truth about the world.

David Morrill: I really just had this sense of mystery and curiosity that would be piqued every time I explored a little deeper down these rabbit holes.

As he was spending these long nights in the basement, there wasn’t just one single conspiracy theory that he was hooked into.

David Morrill: Really the only absolute truth that I was kind of bought into at that point was that there was someone smarter, better, brighter than me who was trying to use collective efforts to break through some kind of information barrier. It's a secret society. Maybe it was the government. But it was somebody of power and influence, with authority, that if I could impress them, if I could solve their riddles and puzzles and what have you, then I'd be in.

But at the time what he was really in was a failing marriage. He was driving for Uber. It was a job he says wasn't especially satisfying. He was lonely and unhappy and often stayed up all night.

David Morrill: You would drink a lot of coffee and stay up later and later, as you go further and further, it becomes increasingly dire. So you dedicate more and more energy to it.

(Music)

David Morrill: If you take a young man with no real prospects and you show him that he might be unlocking secrets that the average person couldn't handle, it's intoxicating.

It makes you feel good, it makes you feel on top of the world, it takes somebody who's not very happy with themselves, and suddenly it's like the most intense rush you could feel? Because you're fishing around, you're looking for these clues, and then you're engaging with other people and it feels like a spy movie.

David would even send in tips to the FBI about the secrets he thought he was uncovering — even though he wasn’t exactly sure WHO this powerful group manipulating things might be or WHAT exactly they were even trying to do. He simply saw himself as a truth seeker.

David Morrill: I wish I could give you really solid, concretized examples. I didn't fully understand what I was doing.

He just knew that if he could figure this whole thing out he might feel much better about himself.

He spent a lot of time looking at jpeg images, trying to find the hidden codes and messages inside them — a technique that he’d heard the 9/11 hijackers had used to communicate messages to one another.

And he became so caught up in this secret world of powerful people that he was uncovering, that it began to affect his relationships with his own family.

David Morrill: I know my parents were concerned and they would ask me if something was the matter. And then at that point, I had become so locked in that I started having genuine, I guess delusions is the correct word, that, you know, maybe my parents are trying to catch me too. Maybe they're a part of it. So they would show concern, and I would hand wave it away, or I'd say I'm fine. But I would every once in a while try to drop subtle cues and hints into conversation with my parents to see if they'd bite, to see if they'd reveal anything. I was not doing particularly well and I thought that maybe they were testing me. You start to become very distrustful of even the closest of people.

(Music)

David certainly isn't alone. Conspiracy theories tend to surround most major events, including ones where the facts have been well established for years, like the moon landing or the 9/11 attacks.

ARCHIVAL Marjorie Taylor Greene: We had witnessed 9/11, uh, the terrorist attack, uum, in New York and the plane that, uh, crashed in Pennsylvania

This is Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene.

ARCHIVAL Marjorie Taylor Greene: And the so-called plane that crashed into the Pentagon. It's odd. There's never any evidence shown for a plane in the Pentagon.

These conspiracy theories involve vaccines, our elections, celebrities like Taylor Swift. They make their rounds on social media….and are sometimes promoted by prominent television personalities like Jesse Waters of Fox News.

ARCHIVAL Jesse Waters: Taylor Swift's the biggest star in the world. Have you ever wondered why or how she blew up like this? Well around four years ago, the Pentagon's Psychological Operations Unit floated turning Taylor Swift into an asset.

But as David Morrill explains it, the one thing that often ties them together is this idea of power and secrecy — someone with all the power doing this thing in secret.

Conspiracy theories certainly make plenty of headlines these days , and it’s not just the media that’s paying more attention to them. So are psychologists and law enforcement officials, with some high-profile cases of violence being committed by people espousing conspiracy theories.

Up next … Why do people believe in conspiracy theories?

ARCHIVAL News Interview Show: I've heard of the one where we did not actually go to the moon, where it was all filmed and it didn't happen.

Are these beliefs more widespread now than they used to be?

ARCHIVAL Reporter: He writes to his friend about reptilians and lizard people that he believed control Earth and had tweaked human DNA. They put a switch into the human brain so they could walk among us and appear human.

And when do they actually pose a threat?

ARCHIVAL Vivek Ramaswamy: Why am I the only person on this stage at least who can say that January 6th now does look like it was an inside job?

I’m Peter Bergen, and this is In the Room.

(Theme music)

In 1919 Henry Ford, who owned the Ford Motor Company — you know, maker of the Model T — well, that year Ford purchased something besides car parts.

He bought the Dearborn Independent, the local newspaper in Dearborn, Michigan. And he began publishing a series of articles in the paper titled “The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem.”

The articles were mainly about one key idea — that somehow there was a vast Jewish conspiracy infecting the United States — that the Jews controlled the global financial system and that Jews were responsible for all sorts of problems — for example, fomenting war.

The newspaper also published excerpts from a document known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which was first published in Czarist Russia. The Protocols was basically totally made up and contained fabricated minutes from alleged meetings of Jewish leaders who’d outlined their secret plans to control the world.

Ford distributed half a million copies of his newspaper to his vast network of car dealerships and readers. You could get a free copy when you bought a car. The Nazis were influenced by the conspiracies Ford wrote about in his articles, ideas that certainly didn't begin with Ford or end with him.

There are conspiracy theories that go back even further than the 1920s — and not just about the Jews. Think about the Salem witch trials. And the ancient Romans believed in some conspiracy theories as well, like the reason that some people were dying was because a cabal of women was secretly poisoning them.

Joseph Uscinski: Everybody believes in one or a few conspiracy theories. And the reason for that is that there's essentially an infinite number of conspiracy theories out there. Anyone can make up anything they want for any reason, and they can share it with whoever they want. And they always have.

Joseph Uscinski is a political scientist and an expert on conspiracy theories. In fact he teaches a very popular class called "Conspiracy Theories" at the University of Miami, where he’s a professor.

Joseph Uscinski: We talk about current debates like is social media turning people into conspiracy theorists? Have we reached the apex of conspiracism in the U.S.?I think a lot of students take the class because they want to come in and have me tell them that, yeah, people are getting abducted by aliens and watch out, you might be next because they're into that sort of stuff.

His research, which includes polling he's done for more than a decade, suggests that conspiracy theories aren't necessarily more prevalent now than before.

Joseph Uscinski: The good news is things might not be as bad as we think. On the other hand, they've probably always been this bad, we just weren't paying attention.

So Uscinski is saying conspiracy theories have been around forever — it's just that now the media is paying more attention and these beliefs are getting more coverage. And he takes issue with how we tend to talk about conspiracy theories.

Joseph Uscinski: Much of the popular discussion of this is, oh, the conspiracy theories pulled him down the rabbit hole. No, conspiracy theories don't do that. They don't grab people and pull them down rabbit holes.

In all the focus on the theories themselves, which make great headlines, this theory about Taylor Swift or this theory about that, you know, it's fun and interesting, entertaining. It's really about people's willingness to believe certain types of ideas. Meaning they like looking at things that tell them what they already believe or that make them feel good about their beliefs and their identity and about their team and they reject things that cause cognitive dissonance.

So why do people get drawn in? For David Morrill, there wasn't one clear driving force or one moment that drew him in.

David Morrill: I know it would be very satisfying to say there was a single hook that got me engaged, but no. And I look in hindsight all the time trying to imagine where did it all go wrong, or what have you, but it's really more of a slow burn than it is a catch like a fish on a line. And I think that's why it's so effective and insidious.

And he wants to make sure that one thing is clear— it's not that people are stupid or have been duped into believing something.

David Morrill: And it's not as if it's an effortless process, right? You think they're just reading foolish stuff and becoming bamboozled. I wouldn't suggest that's what happened, at least if they were involved in anything I was involved in. You had to try to accomplish tasks, and then eventually you're not sure exactly what you believe or don't believe, but you know you're actually putting in legitimate work.

So a lot of people say, Oh, you believe stuff that's untrue. I didn't necessarily know what I believed, but I knew that I was putting in all of this work, that work was real, that work was legitimate and a lot of people are probably feeling very uniquely under-challenged or under engaged for their abilities.

They know that they're better than where they're at, and it's very sobering and very challenging to admit that to yourself and say it's because of my own actions, and it's because of my own inaction that I'm still festering here, that I'm still stuck in this spot. Right? So when, there's the crushing guilt and shame of not living up to your ability in conjunction with an escape hatch, which is these conspiracies that can make you feel potent again, make you feel powerful and invigorated.

And it's very quick and it's very easy and it comes at you in rich, deep dopamine strikes.

(Music)

Peter Bergen: Is there something that makes some people more prone to believe in conspiracies and why do people believe in conspiracy theories in the first place?

Reid Meloy: What the research tells us is that individuals that are prone to anxieties, that feel they do not, they are they're ineffectual in having their voices heard, that feel a sense of fear and concern about their own economic stability that feel like they have been left out of the decision making in their society.

All of those characteristics tend to correlate with individuals who are inclined to adopt conspiracy theories.

Dr. Reid Meloy is a forensic psychologist. He consults with law enforcement and his work is focused on what’s known as threat assessment and threat management. It’s a strategy backed up by decades of research that aims to identify individuals who might carry out an act of targeted violence before they do so. And he's worked on cases where individuals have believed in a range of conspiracy theories.

Reid Meloy: When you adopt a conspiracy theory you now have at least for the short time you have an answer to your problems, that you have a particular group that you can blame for the troubles in your life, the world and the problems and complexities of the world are simplified.

All the gray areas that we struggle with every day are now painted in very black and white terms. There is the group that I belong to that is good. And then there is the conspiratorial group, that is in power. That group is evil but it simplifies my understanding of the world.

And with that, there is a calming and reassuring effect. And then as you join other people for instance, in a group chat or on the Internet, you actually feel connected and bonded to other people.

Peter Bergen: What role does conspiracy theories play in a threat assessment? I presume there are lots of people who believe in conspiracy theories but very few people who may actually go down the pathway to violence to carry out a violent act on behalf of the conspiracy theory.

Reid Meloy: That's absolutely correct and I use the metaphor that's actually from science, and that is the task of our work is to detect the signals among the noise, the violent signals that arise out of the noise of extremism, the noise of conspiracy thinking.

And you're absolutely right that in any population now in the United States, you're going to see anywhere from 15 to 25 to 30 percent of people that will entertain at least some conspiratorial thoughts and absolutely most of those people are never going to carry out an act of violence.

Clearly, not everyone that believes in conspiracy theories poses a threat. But some people do.

Dr. Meloy says the risk for violence among conspiracists can arise in a group dynamic where you have a group that is only in its own echo chamber, where there’s no counter-messaging. Oftentimes the group connects with each other online and is pulled to these conspiracy ideas because they are simple, they are absolute.

Reid Meloy: The conspiracy belief, it's very black and white. It's either-or as these beliefs become more entrenched in the group, they're relished, they're amplified, there's positive emotions that surround them, and then people will tend to believe them absolutely. And any challenge or critical thought concerning those beliefs is rejected.

And when you have a group of people that are moving in this direction, this is where the danger can start to arise. Dr. Meloy says the group begins to develop a two-fold belief in their conspiracy. First, the knowledge they hold is special and not known to other people.

Reid Meloy: And so there's sort of a fueling of self esteem within that. That we are special, we are inside and people will really bond around that notion.

The second thing that happens is, the group develops two additional beliefs. One is that we face an imminent existential threat from this particular out group. And then secondly, we must take hostile action against that out group to protect our way of life, to protect our neighborhood, to protect those we love.

So you get both the narcissism of being special within the group, holding this special knowledge and secondly, the paranoia of believing that your group is under imminent existential threat.

Dr. Meloy says it’s that cauldron — the narcissism combined with that paranoia that your group is under imminent threat…

ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness…(fades under)

…that leads to the kind of violence that took place at the US Capitol on January 6th 2021.

ARCHIVAL Jan. 6 footage: We’ve lost the line. All PD pull back. All the PD pull back up to the upper deck… (fades under)

So that’s the group dynamic.

And Meloy says there are also individuals that might be prone to violence who are not part of a group, who also believe in conspiracy theories.

Reid Meloy: And what we're most concerned about in the individual that entertains this conspiracy belief is that they begin to move to a much more clinically paranoid position.

And the way we distinguish between somebody who is just entertaining conspiratorial thinking and somebody who's becoming clinically paranoid is, the paranoid individual begins to believe that they are personally being attacked or they're about to be personally attacked, and they must preemptively strike against those that pose this imminent risk to them.

That obviously leaves a lot of people out there who potentially might commit an act of violence. So what people like Dr. Meloy help law enforcement and schools and workplaces do is to try to figure out- as he puts it- the signals from the noise. And Meloy says they've identified some important warning indicators for this.

Reid Meloy: There are three that have consistently distinguished and separated attackers from non attackers.

One of these three warning behaviors is known as ‘last resort.’

Reid Meloy: We’re watching within that individual a statement that the time for action is now. I must act.

Peter Bergen: And Dr. Meloy, why do you call it last resort?

Reid Meloy: Because in the mind of the individual, typically, it is mandated violent action, time imperative that I must act and I must act now. The last resort is also tied to the notion that there's no room for any kind of non-violent solution to this problem and all those means are now set aside and our last resort must be violent engagement with the threat, the threat being perhaps an individual or a particular outgroup.

Dr. Meloy says they've seen this particular behavioral indicator in cases of domestic terrorism.

Reid Meloy: It was Robert Bowers and the Tree of Life Synagogue.

ARCHIVAL News Coverage: A short time ago, we were dispatched to active gunfire at the Tree of Life Synagogue.

ARCHIVAL Reporter: There has been a shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Police reporting there are multiple casualties.

ARCHIVAL Reporter: On the day after the deadliest attack on the Jewish community in U. S. history, somber officials formally charged the man who murdered 11 people and injured six others. Robert Bowers faces 29 federal and dozens of state charges for homicide and aggravated assault…

Reid Meloy: Bowers posted on Gab, a Christian nationalist, in my opinion extremist, website. He posted a comment about a Hebrew immigration society slaughtering his people and his last sign off literally just before he went into the Tree of Life Synagogue was “screw your optics, I'm going in.” And you get that sense of time compression and time urgency driven by a conspiratorial thinking about what Jews were doing to him and personally to his life.

The second behavioral indicator is called identification. This is where a person adopts a new dark self-identity, fantasizing about being someone else, for example, a school shooter.

This happened with the Parkland, Florida school shooter. He actually posted to a website the words I want to be a school shooter.

Reid Meloy: The young person oftentimes is compensating for a daily life that is not pleasant, that's not satisfying, and retreats into these very grandiose and oftentimes quite violent fantasies, and how we see it as a threat assessor is we will see individuals begin to move from just thinking about a topic a lot to actually being that topic.

The third indicator is known as the pathway to violence because there is evidence that the person is researching, planning and preparing to carry out an attack.

Dr. Meloy says that Brenton Tarrant, the gunman who carried out the terrorist attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019, planned his attack meticulously over several years. He made sure he was following the law when he got his licenses for his firearms. He also made sure his car registration didn't expire before the attack. Tarrant believed in the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, the idea that there is a plot to replace white people.

ARCHIVAL Reporter 1: Not one but two mosques in Christ Church were targeted, the country's worst mass shooting ever. At least 49 people were killed and dozens wounded. The gunman, who wrote of white nationalism, was armed with at least two semi-automatic weapons and two rifles.

ARCHIVAL Reporter 2: The rambling hate-filled message was posted online around the time of the attack, purported to be written by the suspect, praising American Dylann Roof, who killed nine people in the Charleston church attack in 2015. He also writes about President Donald Trump as a renewed symbol of white identity.

Peter Bergen: What's the relationship between racist ideology and conspiracy theories? You know, obviously the Nazis at their core, were trying to exterminate the Jews because in their view, the Jews posed some kind of existential threat to Germany.

Reid Meloy: So within conspiracy theory typically, you will see the blending of racist attitudes as a way to delineate the threatening group. Not only is the Great Replacement considered a slow-motion genocide, that white people are going to be replaced by people of color globally, but, and here we get even more conspiratorial, the secret organization in the Great Replacement is actually being run by Jews. Run by a cabal of individuals that nobody really knows who they are, but they are in complete control and they pose an imminent threat to us.

The great replacement theory within it has, in a sense, an urgency about it. If you look at Brenton Tarrant’s manifesto you see very, very specifically his sense of urgency that there must be action and there must be action now. And it became very, very personalized for him. That he must be the vanguard. He can be a pioneer in this effort.

Peter Bergen: Just to delve into a couple of cases that you have written about in some detail, the Boston Marathon bombings case, where two brothers, the Tsarnaev brothers, bombed the Marathon.

(sound of explosion from Boston Marathon Bombing)

ARCHIVAL Barack Obama: Multiple people have been wounded, some gravely, in explosions at the Boston Marathon.

ARCHIVAL News Coverage / Boston Marathon Witness: I literally saw the garbage barrel explode. I saw the flash, the fire, the smoke and I just ran as fast as I could I looked over and saw just a pile of bodies. The worst thing I think I've ever seen in my life.

Peter Bergen: I read your recent peer reviewed paper about it, and you focused on Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was the older brother, who was really the kind of mastermind of the operation. Having studied terrorism myself a fair amount, the conventional wisdom has been that terrorists they're kind of as mentally stable as the normal population. But I think in Tamerlan’s case, you make a good case that this was a case of a young man who had real psychiatric issues, but also imbibed a bunch of conspiratorial ideology about the Jews and other things, and that this was a very combustible cocktail, it turned out. But it's not an either or. You had the psychiatric issues, real psychiatric issues, and was increasingly kind of going down a lot of rabbit holes of conspiratorial thinking, as he grew older.

Reid Meloy: Absolutely correct. Tsarnaev and this was reported by multiple individuals that knew him very well prior to the attack, that he was having auditory hallucinations. And what this is, is a symptom of a major mental disorder where a person will actually hear voicesIt's clearly a disorder of the mind that is actually quite medically treatable. And then the other thing with Tsarnaev, you had him go down the rabbit hole of conspiracy and the conspiratorial thinking basically for him had two legs to it. One was that Jewswere controlling the world. He focused a lot on a fabricated brochure called the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But then the other leg was that he believed that the CIA somehow was involved in the conspiratorial controls that he was fighting against.

What you'll see with clinically paranoid individuals is oftentimes they will take a kernel of truth and then they grow that kernel of truth into a very distorted tree of psychopathology. And then they personalize it, that this particular group has implanted certain sensors in my brain. It's controlling my thoughts. They're inserting thoughts into my mind. Those are all signs and symptoms of psychosis.

Tsarnaev also illustrated another very important fact that we see in our work, and that is a severely mentally disordered individual can still plan and prepare to carry out a targeted attack. And that one of the paradoxes here is that oftentimes the delusion of conspiracy, the belief brings with it a certainty and a resolve to carry out the terrorist attack that wouldn't be there but for the delusional belief. The psychosis eliminates any ambivalence about whether or not I should carry out this attack.

So, as you’ve just heard, some people who believe in conspiracy theories also suffer from real psychiatric problems, and they do pose a threat. But again, that’s a relatively small number of people.

There are a lot more people like David Morrill, the guy who was spending all those nights in the basement, whose beliefs don’t pose any sort of physical danger to others.

(Music)

When David was staying up all night, not sleeping and becoming ever more paranoid about the people around him, at one point things kind of all came crashing down all at once.

David Morrill: There was a pretty embarrassing moment where I was in the bathroom, I was taking a shower, I'd let the water go cold. I had been in there for so long, I was trying to solve things in my head, and he came to knock.

David’s father, who had become increasingly concerned about his son’s wellbeing, intervened.

David Morrill: My wife at the time said, David's acting strangely. You know, this is unusual. He's been in there for hours at this point.

So he came in and he was like what's going on? You know, what are you doing? You've been in here for so long and I tried revealing whatever I thought was happening which was nonsense.

I said, oh, you know, I can't figure it out. Eventually he called a crisis team and medical professionals showed up to try to help me and coax me into getting professional assistance.

David is doing a lot better now. But it took time. He eventually went back to school and earned a master's degree. He gives a lot of credit to his dad, who was patient and nonjudgmental.

David Morrill: A lot of these conspiracies, they have that as a built-in protectionary mechanism, which is that you can't trust other people or that this knowledge is so profound or bad or evil that you need to keep it secret, keep it close to the chest.

So it's challenging to find somebody that you can admit everything to when you're not even sure that you've completely solved everything yourself, and then you've got the crushing weight of shame and guilt, and it's tough.

And he wants people out there, who might be engulfed in conspiracy theories to know that’s what helped him.

David Morrill: I know my father had that faith in me. And so, somebody probably has that faith in you too. You just need to find them and you need to be honest. You need to be forthright and you need to admit it.

If someone had tried presenting him with some sort of fact check of his conspiracy theories, he says that just wouldn't have worked.

David Morrill: If somebody showed me a website debunking the things I had been investigating, I would imagine that the walls were closing in on me, and the situation had become more dire, and I would probably recede further into a space of lunacy.

(Music)

Peter Bergen: I guess one of the problems as a forensic psychologist, which you are, somebody who's in the grip of a pretty deep conspiracy theory, for instance, let's say, let's just say the great replacement theory that there's a slow-motion genocide, as you put it, in their minds against white people.

I mean, it must be hard to, kind of as a clinical matter, deal with these kinds of patients because, you know, they don't think it's a conspiracy theory, they think it's “The Truth.” And they don't think they're in a grip of something that's wrong or, or misguided or untrue. They think they've discovered the promised land in terms of what's really running the world.

Reid Meloy: Correct. Yeah, it's very difficult to dislodge a person who is a true believer in a conspiracy theory. One of the approaches that does not guarantee success. But, if it is somebody that's within your family or somebody you're close to that you see this happening to, is to try to be nonjudgmental with them.

Be clear that one does not see the world as they do. And try to find points of empathy and also points of similarity with that person where you can agree. Typically, if you argue or attempt to attack an individual with these kinds of beliefs it will typically harden them because of a phenomenon that's been studied very, very widely, and that's what's called confirmation bias where you refuse to let facts contrary to your belief interfere with your belief.

So the dislodging is very, very hard. There is some really good research that's been done on, it's called inoculation theory, where, there's public wide efforts to inform people of the details of conspiracy theory that may be coming their way, or some of the difficulties with conspiratorial thinking, and this can actually function as an inoculation for people that really haven't faced these kinds of challenges to their own beliefs in real life yet.

Joseph Uscinski, the expert on conspiracy theories, says it's also important to keep in mind that not all conspiracy theories are created equal. Some do pose a greater risk for causing harm.

Joseph Uscinski: If you think Kate Middleton is part of some conspiracy to hide something, you're not gonna go blow something up with a pipe bomb tomorrow. If you think that, you know, Taylor Swift is involved in some deep state thing, you're not going to go out and do anything tomorrow. And we've seen both of those conspiracy theories sort of come and go without really much ado.

But if you're like, you know, the Jews faked the Holocaust and the Rothschilds and all sorts of other things like that, that are sort of uncouth in polite company, then you probably have a bunch of antisocial traits that are going to drive you to act in antisocial ways.

He says according to his polling research, it's pretty common, if you are on the losing side of an election, for some percentage of people to believe the vote was rigged.

Uscinski believes the problem with January 6th is that you had a leader priming people for violence. And that's what he's most concerned about — powerful and influential people spreading conspiracy theories.

Joseph Uscinski: When we poll after elections, you get between 30 and 50 percent of people identifying with the losing party as saying it was rigged. It's quite normal. It's a very human reaction. Right. What makes 2020 different? Well you have a lot more of the losing party saying it was rigged. So instead of between 30 and 50 percent, you get between 60 and 80 percent saying it was rigged. So, you're getting about twice the amount of people thinking that it's rigged than you would normally have.

Probably the reason for that is that you had the sitting president, members of the Senate, members of Congress, and much of the conservative media, including Fox, and much of the radio, you know, conservative radiosphere saying it was rigged, it was rigged, it was rigged.

So Uscinski thinks the focus should be on the leaders who are spreading conspiracy theories.

Joseph Uscinski: We've had a lot of representatives and senators and major commenters in the conservative sphere talking about white replacement conspiracy theories.

ARCHIVAL Tucker Carlson: In a democracy, one person equals one vote. If you change the population, you dilute the political power of the people who live there. So every time they import a new voter, I become disenfranchised as a current voter.

Joseph Uscinski: And when we poll on these sorts of ideas, we're getting up to 30 percent of Americans agreeing somewhat with these sorts of white replacement theories, and a lot of the people who agree with it, they tend to have personality traits that seem to be aligned with acting in antisocial ways.

(Music)

David Morrill says he never contemplated carrying out any sort of violence, and he didn't really interact with anyone else who did either. But he did experience harm. And not just in all that time he spent in the basement.

David Morrill: The amount of potential that just goes down the drain in these silly goose hunts, it's it's very damaging to the self and society as a whole because if you could take this energy, take this fervor, trying to solve conspiracy theories and direct it towards more medical research, everything would improve.

If I could just have one guy listen to me and say, oh geez, hey, that sounds kind of like me, maybe I'm making a similar mistake. If I could catch somebody before they fall into the hole, that would be really great.

As he’s shared his story in recent years he does get people who reach out to him asking for help.

David Morrill: Frequently it's parents reaching out to me saying that my son or my daughter is going through an experience like this saying, what do I do? What do I do?

He does have some advice that he hopes will help.

David Morrill: Be patient. Continue to care, there's somebody in there that is still the person, of course, entirely. They're just a little confused right now And again, you're, you're trying to push through something that for them has taken a long time to take shape and take form.

So you talking with them once, that's a small drop in the ocean compared to the torrent of misinformation or disinformation that they've been funnel fed for however long, right? So it would be strange to think that you could just say, Hey, snap out of it, wake up. And that would work, right? No, they've been hammered, they've been peppered with this stuff for a very long time.

So it's gonna take some dedication and some time to work it out the other way.

If you want to learn more about the topics we covered in today’s episode we recommend … the International Handbook of Threat Assessment co edited by Reid Meloy, and American Conspiracy Theories by Joseph Uscinski and Joseph Parent.

Both are available on Audible.

CREDITS

IN THE ROOM WITH PETER BERGEN is an Audible Original.

Produced by Audible Studios and FRESH PRODUCE MEDIA.

This episode was produced by Alexandra Salomon, with help from Holly Demuth.

It was sound designed by Joe DeCeault.

Our executive producer is Alison Craiglow.

Katie McMurran is our technical director.

Our staff also includes Erik German, Luke Cregan,, Nathan Ray and Sandy Melara.

Our theme music is by Joel Pickard.

Our Executive Producers for Fresh Produce Media are Colin Moore and Jason Ross.

Our Head of Production is Elena Bawiec.