A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy by Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum (review)

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• A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy by Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum
• Michael Butter (bio)

a lot of people are saying: the new conspiracism and the assault on democracy
Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum
Princeton University Press
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691188836/a-lot-of-people-are-saying
232 pages; Print, $26.95

Conspiracy theories are an exciting topic but often tedious to study. That is because conspiracy theorists usually go to great lengths to prove their claims. They analyze sources and secret communication, draw on eyewitness reports and make inferences, and are obsessed with details. In Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, Augustin Barruel blames the Freemasons and Illuminati for orchestrating the French Revolution and provides footnotes on each of its several hundred pages; David Ray Griffin's The New Pearl Harbor Revisited, which claims that 9/11 was an "inside job" conducted by the US government, unfolds its argument in 250 pages, which are followed by 80 pages of notes. The first text was published in 1797, the second in 2008. This shows how stable the mode of conspiracist argumentation has remained over the centuries. It was not even affected by the stigmatization that conspiracy theories underwent after World War II in Europe and North America, as Katharina Thalmann has shown in a meticulously argued book reviewed by Todor Hristov in this issue. When conspiracy theories ceased being the commonly accepted explanation of events and began to be eyed suspiciously by the majority of people, and especially by epistemic authorities, their proponents were left with two options. They could either embrace their marginalization and articulate their allegations openly in a language replete with claims of hidden plots and evil designs, or they could veil that they were spreading conspiracy theories by pretending to be just asking questions. Both options, however, meant presenting lengthy arguments and getting bogged down in details.

This way of presenting conspiracist allegations is what Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum call the "old conspiracism." Their intriguing claim [End Page 22] is that in the United States in recent years it has largely been superseded by what they call "the new conspiracism." Whereas the old conspiracism depended on evidence, the new one, they argue, thrives on repetition. An accusation is repeated over and over again, but no attempt is made to prove it. It is, in their memorable phrase, "conspiracy without the theory." The claim is validated when it is repeated by people who reiterate, retweet, like, or forward it: "If a lot of people are saying it, to use Trump's signature phrase, then it is true enough" (emphasis in the original).

At first sight, this argument is quite convincing. Twitter's/X's character limit of first 140 and later 280 characters shapes what is said and how it is said. On the platform, conspiracy rumors, that is, short, uncorroborated claims, are thriving because there is no space for full-fledged theories. On closer examination, however, the argument that there is a new conspiracism and that it, unlike the old one, is particularly harmful to democracy does not hold. The features that Muirhead and Rosenblum identify as new are not new at all but have been standard ingredients of conspiracist discourse for decades, such as asking "ominous" questions, or even centuries, such as scapegoating and constructing a collective "we."

Let me refute just two of their claims in detail. They suggest that the new conspiracism differs from the old one in its "rejection of simple, verifiable facts." However, conspiracy theories from past centuries are full of similar rejections. For example, countless conspiracist texts about 9/11 ignore the fact that WTC 7, the third building that collapsed that day, had been heavily damaged by fire and debris from the Twin Towers before it came down. They focus exclusively on footage that shows the intact front of the building to support their thesis that it was brought down by controlled demolition. The same goes for the authors' suggestion that for the new conspiracism an allegation does not need to be true but only "true enough." One of the examples they...