Like the so-called Epstein files, which were first handed to a small band of briefly jubilant right-wingers several weeks ago, the John F. Kennedy files released last week by the National Archives turned out to be, by the standards of conspiracy hype, a total dud. President Trump promised 80,000 pages, then delivered nearly 64,000, none of which contained any electric revelations about the ground zero event of modern American political paranoia. In fact, so much of what was released was already public that the document dump produced its own meta-conspiracy theory: How could so much hype and anticipation yield only this?
Probably the most interesting newly unredacted document had nothing directly to do with the Kennedy assassination at all. That was a 1961 memo from the historian-turned-Camelot-whisperer Arthur Schlesinger Jr., warning Kennedy that the C.I.A. had so grown in reach and influence abroad that in many parts of the world it was a much more significant diplomatic player than the State Department, which the C.I.A. had also infiltrated pervasively. Not long after President Dwight Eisenhower lamented the rise of a military-industrial complex, Schlesinger wrote, American foreign policy was being conducted at least as much in secret as in public.
Schlesinger’s evaluation wouldn’t surprise a Cold War scholar or, for that matter, anyone raised on the spy novels and paranoid thrillers of the era. Even so, not that long ago it would have raised a fair number of eyebrows — an unambiguous real-time acknowledgment, from an unmistakable voice of the midcentury establishment, that the ascendant American empire was infested with secrecy and intrigue through and through.
Today it’s old news — and not just because it’s a distant artifact or because it pales in comparison with hoped-for revelations about the assassination. Over six decades and especially in recent years, the country has grown much more paranoid in its thinking, so much that it is now almost a cliché to run through it in shorthand — “deep state,” QAnon, Russiagate — and say we are living in a golden age for conspiracy theory. At the same time, revelations about the clandestine workings of power no longer seem to deliver the lasting shock they once might have. This is perhaps because, in recent years, reality has taken an explicit paranoid turn, too.
It is now perfectly reasonable, for instance, to believe that a novel virus that killed more than 20 million people worldwide and upended for years the daily life of billions was engineered by scientists and then released by accident, with a global cover-up improvised in the months that followed. To me, it is probably fair to call this a campaign of information suppression, but it does not appear to have been especially effective, since as early as May 2020, at roughly the peak of that censorship, nearly half of Americans believed the Covid virus had come out of a lab. But over time, the lab-leak theory of pandemic origins has grown even closer to consensus, and not just in America; the German spy agency, for instance, now believes that the virus probably came out of a lab — a view broadly in line with the views of American intelligence.
Other conspiracy theories hang so much in plain sight, they look like wallpaper. The biggest story of the new presidential term, for instance, has been that the world’s richest man, anointed rather than elected to government, has spent the administration’s first two months trying to resize and reprogram the functioning of the entire federal bureaucracy — relying on a team of shadowy operatives devoted enough to secrecy and anonymity that those identifying them have been accused by Musk of criminal harassment.
This web of conspiracy reality is not brand-new. There was, in fact, Russian interference in the 2016 election, if probably not the coordinated kind that obsessed resistance liberals through Trump’s first term (in which Blackwater’s Erik Prince appeared to be conducting a shadow American foreign policy). The Panama Papers revealed a large network of corruption, influence and tax avoidance by the world’s richest and most powerful people; in the 1MDB scandal, billions of dollars had allegedly been stolen from the Malaysian government and funneled into Hollywood (among other places).
In 2016 it was at least a small scandal that Trump didn’t put his financial holdings in a blind trust before assuming the presidency; by 2022, it was barely a news story when the Saudi crown prince’s investment fund gave $2 billion to Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law; and by 2024, it was so taken for granted that the family was hoping to profit while governing that no one really blinked when the president released a meme coin on the eve of his inauguration. In 2020 and 2021 the Department of Defense conducted a social media disinformation campaign to dampen the uptake of Chinese Covid vaccines in the Philippines and several Muslim-majority countries in Central Asia, and over the past five years, we’ve been treated to several serious news cycles about U.F.O.s and what the government has learned about them.
And then there is Jeffrey Epstein, the obvious lodestar of this everybody-knows age of conspiracy and corruption, whose connections to many of the world’s most powerful people are not whispered rumors but stunningly well-known facts. This is part of what made social media enthusiasm about the Epstein files during the presidential campaign so strange. We already had the flight logs and the address book, the video with Trump and the photo of Musk and Ghislaine Maxwell. (We even had the story of Steve Bannon conducting a long on-camera interview with Epstein, as a way of testing whether an appearance on “60 Minutes” would be a good idea.)
There remain genuine mysteries — about the real source of Epstein’s wealth, the exact nature of those relationships, the possibility of connections to various intelligence agencies, the precise nature of his death. But as remarkable as what remains hidden or unknown was all that has been revealed.
Over the past decade, as conspiratorial thinking leached further inward from the cultural fringe, a flock of liberal commentators — many of them intuitive defenders of the vital center, in the Schlesinger tradition — have devoted themselves to the question of why paranoia has lately become so widespread in America.
In many of these accounts, the internet plays a central role — a network of infinite wormholes, some opening up into full-on alternate realities like QAnon and sudden vaccine death. Others have emphasized the way that conspiratorial clout has gained access to real power in a new media and political landscape, such that someone who inscribed a QAnon slogan into copies of the children’s book that he wrote could now be the director of the F.B.I. Still others have emphasized the intuitive appeal of paranoia to those feeling threatened by or struggling to make sense of a disordered world — or to those who’d prefer to approach that dizzying reality like a role-playing game.
And while conventional wisdom places conspiracy theory at the political fringe, some recent research suggests the sweet spot for it is among those with left-wing economic beliefs and right-wing cultural ones.
One explanation that has acquired a special shine lately is that we have left behind an age of literacy, which was defined by a certain kind of critical thinking, and are entering something that more resembles an oral culture. This idea of an oral revival has been poking its way into the conversation every few years as a way of characterizing the downstream effects of podcasting and social video and TikTok. (A related term, recently coined by Kate Wagner, is “phoneworld.”) But I’ve always felt it was especially well described by Caleb Crain almost two decades ago, before all of that, in an essay called “Twilight of the Books”:
In an oral culture, cliché and stereotype are valued, as accumulations of wisdom, and analysis is frowned upon, for putting those accumulations at risk. There’s no such concept as plagiarism, and redundancy is an asset that helps an audience follow a complex argument. Opponents in struggle are more memorable than calm and abstract investigations, so bards revel in name-calling and in “enthusiastic description of physical violence.” Since there’s no way to erase a mistake invisibly, as one may in writing, speakers tend not to correct themselves at all. Words have their present meanings but no older ones, and if the past seems to tell a story with values different from current ones, it is either forgotten or silently adjusted. As the scholars Jack Goody and Ian Watt observed, it is only in a literate culture that the past’s inconsistencies have to be accounted for, a process that encourages skepticism and forces history to diverge from myth.
But what happens when history starts to resemble myth, when the inconsistencies reveal themselves not through deep study but in the most superficial scroll of our phones?
The new age of political paranoia obviously reflects a toxic efflorescence of grass-roots distrust, not to mention the structural pathologies of a new information environment. But sometimes I wonder whether we’re putting too much emphasis on those structures in trying to make sense of that paranoia. Is conspiracy theory downstream from culture, in other words, or from history? Is it a question of how information flows to us or what flotsam is coming our way? Probably the influence doesn’t run in just one direction, however comforting it may be to believe a less polluted information environment is just a few design tweaks away.
Much of the resulting pattern is horrifying and disorienting to me, including the way that paranoid thinking works to excuse actual conspiracy, making once-outrageous betrayals of public trust seem like an intuitive response to power. (Perhaps they are.) But given the recent run of history, I can’t say I’m entirely surprised so many have started to see the world more conspiratorially, either.
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