The triumph of bullshit

Internet conspiracy theories are now official government policy.

Liz Dye

During the first Trump administration, Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler documented more than 30,000 lies by the president. Now Trump’s back in the White House and Kessler is gone, as the Post’s owner Jeff Bezos seeks to make the storied paper more MAGA-friendly.

The nature of lies in MAGA-world has changed, too. We’re a long way from “covfefe” and tumescent hurricanes Sharpied® on a weather map. This is an era of lies as policy, where government priorities are based on right-wing conspiracy theories and fear-mongering. The federal agencies that survived Elon Musk’s wrecking ball are now captured by the echo chamber of his social media platform, with cabinet secretaries staring furiously into a digital funhouse mirror to divine the will of the most internet-addled members of the MAGA base.

Harmeet Dhillon, a former Trump lawyer placed in charge of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, even bragged to the Wall Street Journal that she “wakes up around 6am and begins her workday scrolling through X, searching for claims of discrimination … After spotting ‘a list of new horrors,’ she said, ‘I text my deputies, and we assign cases, and we get cranking.’”

Dhillon’s office has been bleeding staff, since experienced lawyers are largely disinclined to waste their time chasing down the latest target of conservative ire. But she did find someone to harass the Portland Police Bureau for daring to arrest conservative provocateur Nick Sortor during a demonstration in which he stole a burning flag from a protester. Sortor was invited to the White House the following week, where he held forth alongside Jack Posobiec, of Pizzagate fame, and online propagandist Andy Ngo, a former Dhillon client.

The message was clear: The White House is fully occupied by conspiracy theorists, and their maniacal postings will inform federal policy.

Chemtrails and climate change

One of the most persistent right-wing conspiracy theories involves contrails — aka, “chemtrails.”

We’re all familiar with the sight of airplanes drawing white lines across a blue sky as water droplets condense around particles of exhaust and freeze into ice crystals at high altitude. The science behind the phenomenon isn’t complicated — it’s not the aurora borealis! — and the Environmental Protection Agency has a handy explainer for anyone who skipped seventh grade science class.

And yet, for decades conspiracy theorists have told themselves stories about “the government” spraying harmful chemicals on Americans for nefarious purposes.

Sometime in the late 1990s, this merged with generalized hyperventilation about “weather control.” And so, on the verge of a manmade climate disaster, millions of Americans are still squinting in fear at imaginary sky ghosts.

Enter EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, who is hyped to exploit that fear for political gain.

“Americans have legitimate questions about contrails and geoengineering, and they deserve straight answers,” Zeldin burbled with affected sincerity. “We’re publishing everything EPA knows about these topics on these websites.”

If this were part of an effort to disabuse the American public of false beliefs about contrails, it would be appropriate. But it is not. Instead, Zeldin piggybacks on the existing chemtrail conspiracy theory to attack scientific efforts to combat climate change.

“The new webpage also addresses head-on various claims that these occurrences are actually an intentional release of dangerous chemicals or biological agents at high altitudes for a variety of nefarious purposes, including population control, mind control, or attempts to geoengineer Earth or modify the weather,” he promises. Two of these things are not like the others and don’t belong.

No one is releasing biological agents from airplanes as aerosolized birth control or mind control. But scientists are working on ways to reflect more heat back into space to avoid cooking the planet. And characterizing that as an evil conspiracy is legitimately nefarious — particularly when your agency is furiously deleting all references to climate change and canceling grants and permits for clean energy projects.

Racism? In the Trump White House?

Trump, whose first foray into presidential politics involved lies about Barack Obama’s birth certificate, loves a racist conspiracy theory. During the campaign, he spewed monstrous falsehoods about Haitian refugees in Ohio eating pets.

But there is one group of immigrants Trump loves: white South Africans.

Just two weeks into his second term, Trump signed an executive order purporting to cut off aid to South Africa for its “countless government policies designed to dismantle equal opportunity in employment, education, and business, and hateful rhetoric and government actions fueling disproportionate violence against racially disfavored landowners.”

The president subscribes to a conspiracy theory about a “white genocide” in South Africa, a subset of the white supremacist great replacement theory. Proponents include right-wing shitposter Mike Cernovich and South Africa native Elon Musk.

In the Oval Office, Trump ambushed South African President Cyril Ramaphosa with a grossly misleading video, juxtaposing unrelated images to suggest that the country’s roads were lined with graves of murdered white farmers. When Ramaphosa objected, Trump insisted that “you do allow them to take land, and then when they take the land, they kill the white farmer, and when they kill the white farmer nothing happens to them.”

There is no genocide of white South Africans. Nor is there a mass expropriation of white-owned land. After colonialism and apartheid, white South Africans make up roughly seven percent of the country’s population, but control 82 percent of the arable land, and the murder rate for whites is far lower than for Blacks. And the land reform law referred to in the executive order was not enacted “to enable the government of South Africa to seize ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation.” This is utter brainrot nonsense.

And yet, at the same time Trump froze refugee admissions, he granted “asylum” to roughly 60 white Afrikaners. In fact, the Washington Post reports that the Trump administration will prioritize white South Africans, allotting them 7,000 of a mere 7,500 slots for refugees this year, in part based on the utterly false claim that they are persecuted victims of genocide.

If you’ve got a problem, RFK can make it worse

But no agency has been more dedicated to advancing conspiracy theories than the Department of Health and Human Services. Under the aegis of Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a prolific spreader of misinformation, DHS revoked vaccine guidelines and is preparing to come after everything from birth control to fluoridated water.

Kennedy got rich flogging lies about childhood vaccines causing autism. And once in office he continued that campaign, vowing in April that “by September, we will know what has caused the autism epidemic and we’ll be able to eliminate those exposures.” But doing actual science is hard — particularly when you’re taking a machete to scientific funding. So instead they announced that they’d found the culprit, and it was Tylenol, plus maybe ... circumcision?

“There’s two studies that show children who are circumcised early have double the rate of autism. And it’s highly likely because they’re given Tylenol,” Kennedy claimed at a cabinet meeting on October 9.

Those studies have been roundly criticized, and even Kennedy admitted that “none of this is dispositive,” but Trump has never been one to pay attention to stupid platitudes like “correlation does not equal causation.” And so the president screeched invective about the dangers of Tylenol for weeks. 

And now Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who hopes to unseat the state’s Republican Sen. John Cornyn, has gotten in on the action.

Paxton filed a lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson in rural Panola County (pop. 22,491) alleging that the drug manufacturer hid the risks that Tylenol caused autism from Texas mothers. The complaint describes the science as “fully settled,” and quotes Trump’s ranting as if it were a peer-reviewed study:

[Trump] noted that the federal government was “strongly recommending that women limit Tylenol use during pregnancy unless medically necessary. That’s, for instance, in cases of extremely high fever.” He repeatedly urged pregnant women that they should not take acetaminophen unless absolutely necessary. And he also made clear that acetaminophen should not be reflexively given to children “after the baby is born,” either. None of this information had previously been provided to pregnant women by Defendants, via Tylenol labels, packaging, in-store merchandising, advertisements, or any other methods.

The information wasn’t provided to pregnant women because there’s no conclusive evidence that it’s true. So far, this seems like the Trump administration looking at the chemtrails of a handful of studies and inferring a dastardly plot to poison the population. But what happens in DC doesn’t stay in DC — it’s now being treated like admissible evidence in court.

Internet conspiracy theories are now official government policy and the animating force in Republican politics. In short, we are awash in bullshit. And while Steve Bannon famously advocated a “flood the zone with shit” strategy, he presumably meant it as a means to overwhelm the opposition, not a prelude to diving in headfirst. The shit was supposed to be a weapon … but today it’s the stream that carries the GOP forward.

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