Oh, The Perils of Conspiracy

When it comes to rabbit holes, it's only down, never up.

When it comes to conspiracy theorists, if you promise to have the goods, you’d better deliver the goods.

US Attorney General Pam Bondi found that out the hard way today, when MAGA revolted against news that her Department of Justice was not, in fact, going to produce a “client list” belonging to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

That’s right, the DOJ and FBI have no evidence that Epstein blackmailed powerful figures, kept a “client list,” or was murdered in prison.

It’s the first time the Trump administration has officially contradicted the pervasive right-wing conspiracy theories about Epstein, which members of the current Trump administration once helped push.

Womp, womp.

Having been in media for over two decades, I’ve watched the rise of conspiracy theories infect the news – both news consumers and news producers – in ways that are truly baffling, heartbreaking, and terrifying.

Conspiracy theories are a lot of things. They are often stupid and logic-defying. They and their consumers are often resistant to evidence and facts. They are even occasionally dangerous. But more than anything else, they are deeply addictive. More on that in a minute.

But first, just to catch you up, despite the Epstein case being sufficiently concluded years ago, right-wing news outlets, MAGA, and even President Trump himself, have since spread baseless conspiracy theories about the nature of Epstein’s death in prison – “#EpsteinDidn’tKillHimself” – and the existence of a list of famous clients, which would, according to them, include and implicate former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Bill Gates, and other favorite liberal targets.

Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, and FBI deputy director Dan Bongino “chose to prioritize a long-concluded case to assuage conservative media and the obsessive core of Trump supporters who see the case as nefarious unfinished business,” per the New York Times.

Back in February, Bondi staged a dramatic live event, giving a “scoop” to 15 pro-Trump social media influencers – fans of conspiracy theories including and especially this one – at the White House.

They performatively marched out of the White House that day with white binders labeled “The Epstein Files: Phase 1.” This was it, they thought – the long-promised and damning documents that were finally going to ruin their adversaries.

“But they quickly soured after opening the binders,” wrote Julie K. Brown, the dogged and courageous Miami Herald reporter who broke the Epstein case open years ago. They realized “that they contained pages of redacted material and flight logs that were already made public in 2021.”

In so many ways this was perfect – a conspiracy-promoting AG pretending to deliver real facts to “prove the conspiracy true,” and assuming, perhaps, that these conspiracy-loving influencers would be too dumb or loony to realize there was nothing in them.

This is after Bondi had told Fox News of the supposed client list, “It’s sitting on my desk right now to review. That’s been a directive by President Trump. I’m reviewing that. I’m reviewing JFK files, MLK files.” In other words, the important stuff.

Then, in May, Bongino awkwardly confessed to FoxNews, the same place he’d been pushing the Epstein conspiracy theories for years, that he no longer believed Epstein was murdered after all. Patel, too, had been trafficking in the Epstein muck, telling Benny Johnson, “Put on your big boy pants and let us know who the pedophiles are” back in 2023.

MAGA ate this shit up. It goes without saying they obviously ignored the inconvenient fact that Epstein and Trump were longtime friends, and what all of that could ultimately mean.

But despite Bongino and Patel and Bondi’s declarations that there wasn’t any there there anymore, MAGA couldn’t drop it.

“I think it was a blackmail operation run by the CIA and the Israeli intel services, and probably others,” said Tucker Carlson. “You know, French intelligence always has a hand in everything, I’ve noticed, so probably them, too.”

Others in MAGA have simply decided Bongino, Patel and Bondi were now part of the Deep State, another favored conspiracy that’s been used to diminish unfavorable and unflattering truths about Trump.

But this is how conspiracy theories go, inevitably and without exception. They are never dropped, they just morph and metastasize into other things. Because the conspiracy theorist doesn’t want to know the actual truth – it’s the believing in the unseen, nefarious thing that keeps them coming back for more and more.

Jenny Rice, a professor of rhetoric at the University of Kentucky describes it as an inversion of the cliche that “seeing is believing.” She explains, “You can only believe the things that you can’t see,” if you’re a conspiracy theorist. “The things that we are shown are deliberately produced and delivered to us and therefore are not trustworthy.”

So no amount of evidence will shake their belief in the thing that is satisfactorily known to the rest of us, but forever unknowable to the conspiracy theorist.

“You know, conspiracy theories don’t get to a point where they say, okay, mystery solved, our work here is done.” says Rice. “Because to a certain extent, you know, part of what draws in people to conspiracy theory is that it is unending.”

We know how this can corrupt rationality and lead to dangerous situations. From Paul Pelosi to Anthony Fauci, the Jan 6th insurrectionists to health care workers, MAGA conspiracy theories about everything from the 2020 election to Covid have led people to make some very, very bad decisions.

But how this operates in the media is particularly problematic. These theories aren’t just being spread on reddit threads from one guy’s basement to another guy’s basement. They’re being platformed by people and companies that many news consumers believe are in the business of telling facts.

Fox News found this out the expensive way when it was successfully sued to the tune of $787 million for spreading false information about the 2020 election. So did Alex Jones, who was ordered to pay a whopping $1.5 billion to the families of Sandy Hook shooting victims for spreading lies about the tragedy.

But as Fox, Tucker Carlson, Jones, Bongino, Patel, and plenty others know better than anyone else, once you start trafficking in the drug that is conspiracy theory, it’s almost impossible to stop.

The audience that is there for that particular product will only want more and more of it, and so to remain “credible” to those news consumers, the news producers have to keep doubling-down on the lies and baseless theories to keep them satisfied and engaged. Or they’ll just go find it elsewhere.

Carlson ultimately ran into the business-end of this phenomenon at Fox, where he’d been increasingly leaning into the fringe conspiracies that hadn’t cracked mainstream news yet: conspiracies about the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich, Hillary Clinton spying on Trump, Fauci “creating” Covid, Ukrainian biolabs and more. But the Dominion lie was apparently too far, or too expensive, for Fox and Carlson was fired.

But, rather than this being seen as a clear hit on his credibility, folks like him, who create conspiracy dependencies amongst their followers, just end up going elsewhere to peddle their junk and quackery, which actually endears them even further to their fans. “See? Now that he’s no longer beholden to those corporate overlords he can tell us the real truth.”

One of the saddest devolutions of a one-time star reporter is the story of Lara Logan.

Lara was a well-respected and admired war reporter for CBS News, where she covered big stories in war zones like Iraq and Afghanistan for “60 Minutes,” the gold-standard of long-form journalism. Eventually she was made chief foreign affairs correspondent for CBS News.

In 2013, she was forced to apologize for an inaccurate “60 Minutes” report about the Benghazi attack, which resulted in a leave of absence. After leaving CBS, she began heavily criticizing the media and wading into conspiratorial content, eventually turning up again as a right-wing, pro-Trump commentator at both Sinclair Broadcast Group and Fox News, briefly.

She began tweeting insane and often easily discredited theories on everything from AIDS to antifa, at one point comparing Fauci to Nazi scientist Josef Mengele, who did horrific experiments on Jewish prisoners.

She’s connected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to “satanic occult” practices, and praised Russian President Vladimir Putin for not allowing “the globalists” to take over the world. She’s claimed that the Rothschild family, often a target of anti-Semitic theories, engineered the Civil War, as well as the assassinations of Lincoln and JFK.

She’s since been fired by Fox, and then hired and fired by Newsmax for saying a cabal of world leaders pushed open borders “while they dine on the blood of children” and make people eat insects.

From there she wrote an election denial movie, bankrolled by My Pillow Guy Mike Lindell, and has teamed up with a man named Luke Coffee, whom she called “an extraordinary man – the best you’ll ever meet.” Coffee was found guilty of six felony offenses related to the Jan 6th insurrection, including assaulting police officers.

It’s a tragic tale of what happens to a once-respected journalist who fell down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories and can’t get out.

The conspiracy theory train is forever – once you hop on it, it’s really hard to get off. The behavior that is most imperiling their careers is the exact thing fans will want more and more of, and they’ll never be satiated.

Logan’s just one of countless news personalities who were once trusted in the mainstream and are now relegated to quack and fringe outlets where no one’s worried about journalistic standards or the truth.

That Trump has empowered a number of these folks and put them in key positions inside his administration is alarming, sure, but also somewhat ironic. The Bonginos and Patels of the world, in this case two conspiracy peddlers who are wholly unqualified for their jobs leading the FBI, are now in the position of having to tell the very people they conditioned to believe their garbage to believe them now when they tell them it wasn’t true. Good luck with that.