My dive into podcasts about conspiracy thinking—notably QAnon Anonymous and Knowledge Fight—have brought the astute and entertaining journalist Anna Merlan into my world. Since learning about her, I’ve eagerly followed her coverage of Tim Ballard for Vice and other conspiracy-adjacent topics. After listening to an episode of Knowledge Fight, in which one of the hosts interviewed Merlan, I had to get my hands on a copy of Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power. I was not disappointed.
In Republic of Lies, Merlan gallops through nearly a decade of counterfactual beliefs: Pizzagate and the rise of QAnons, fake false flags, white nationalist myths, anti-vaxxer fury, deliriously strange sovereign citizens, and much more. Merlan isn’t afraid to poke fun at conspiracy theorists and other believers, but she never forgets to show their humanity by diving into the reasons why people hold such strange, often-debunked beliefs. Some of the conspiracies Merlan talks to believers about are truly dazzling in their complexity, cynicism, and intractability.
Merlan points out that conspiracy thinking and beliefs are hard to shake for a couple of reasons. One is that many of the people who espouse these conspiracies have been genuinely hard done by and feel powerless to change things as they are. These folks have been laid off and left jobless. They’ve been bankrupted by the medical and insurance system. They’ve tangled with the legal system and been bewildered by injustice. Conspiracy thinking offers hope that better times are around the corner. Another reason is that, sometimes, the conspiracies are real, as with US-backed overthrows of other countries’ governments (e.g. Guatemala, Iran, and numerous others), the CIA’s MKUltra, the FBI’s COINTELPRO, and the Tuskegee syphilis study. If these conspiracies turned out to be real, the thinking goes, it makes you wonder what They are doing and haven’t been caught at yet.
This is one of the best books I’ve read about conspiracy thinking. I can’t say that this book makes it all make sense but it sure comes close. Merlan thoroughly demonstrates how pervasive conspiracy thinking is in some parts of the United States and how it has influenced voters as the country grows increasingly divided. The sheer breadth of Republic of Lies deeply unsettled me because, as Merlan shows, there is no magic bullet for fixing the mass delusion. In order to stop people from believing in these kinds of conspiracies, so much would have to change—our political system, our medical system, metastatic capitalism, and, to some extent, history and human nature—that conspiracy thinking will always be with us. We can only hope to manage its current manifestations and chip away at our systemic failures.