Merlan - Republic of lies: American conspiracy theorists and their surprising rise to power

In January 2015, I spent the longest, queasiest week of my life on a cruise ship filled with conspiracy theorists. As our boat rattled toward Mexico and back, I heard about every wild plot, secret plan, and dark cover-up imaginable. It was mostly fascinating, occasionally exasperating, and the cause of a headache that took months to fade. To my pleasant surprise, given that I was a reporter traveling among a group of deeply suspicious people, I was accused only once of working for the CIA.

The unshakable certainty that many of the conspiracy theorists possessed sometimes made me want to tear my hair out, how tightly they clung to the strangest and most far-fetched ideas. I was pretty sure they had lost their hold on reality as a result of being permanently and immovably on the fringes of American life. I felt bad for them and, to be honest, a little superior.

The things that everyone thinks are crazy now, Sean David Morton proclaimed early in the trip, the mainstream will pick up on them. Twenty-sixteen is going to be one of those pivotal years, not just in human history, but in American history as well.

Morton is a self-proclaimed psychic and UFO expert, and someone who has made a lot of dubious claims about how to beat government agencies such as the IRS in court. I dismissed his predictions about 2016 the way I dismissed a lot of his prophecies and basic insistence about how the world works. Morton and the other conspiracy theorists on the boat were confident of a whole lot of things I found unbelievable but which have plenty of adherents in the United States and abroad. Some of them asserted that mass shootings like Sandy Hook are staged by our own government with the help of crisis actors as part of a sinister (and evidently delayed) gun-grab. The moon landing was obviously fake (that one didnt even merit much discussion). The government was covering up not just the link between vaccines and autism but also the cures for cancer and AIDS. Everywhere they looked, there was a hidden plot, a secret cabal, and as the Gospel of Matthew teaches about salvation, only a narrow gate that leads to the truth.

I chronicled my stressful, occasionally hilarious, unexpectedly enlightening experience onboard the Conspira-Sea Cruise as a reporter for the feminist website Jezebel, and then I tried to forget about it. I had done a kooky trip on a boat, the kind of stunt journalism project every features writer loves, and it was over. Conspiracy theorists, after all, were a sideshow.

Yet I began to notice that they were increasingly encroaching on my usual beats, like politics. In July 2016, I was walking down a clogged, chaotic narrow street in Cleveland, Ohio, where thousands of reporters, pundits, politicians, and Donald Trump fans had massed to attend the Republican National Convention. I was there for Jezebel again and was busy taking pictures of particularly sexist antiHillary Clinton merchandise. There was a lot of it around, for sale on the street and proudly displayed on peoples bodies: TRUMP THAT BITCH buttons, white T-shirts reading HILLARY SUCKS, BUT NOT LIKE MONICA.

I stopped a guy in his twenties, dark-haired, built, and jaunty, walking past wearing an eye-catching black HITLERY shirt: a photo of Hillary Clinton adorned with a Hitler mustache, smirking slightly.

Can I take your photo? I asked. He agreed, and then I noticed a bizarre sight: the guys walking with him. There were maybe eight of them, and they were enormous, muscle-bound, and heavily bearded. A couple were wearing camo pants and dusty boots. They looked like members of a militia, fresh from a training exercise in the desert, set loose in urban Ohio.

Where are you guys from? I asked as delicately as I could.

One of them grinned at me.

Were reporters, he said merrily.

No, youre not, I blurted, without thinking. The biggest guy winked and showed me his press badge: they were from InfoWars, the mega-empire of suspiciona radio show, website, and vastly profitable store of lifestyle productsfounded by Austin, Texasbased host Alex Jones.

Later that night, I saw the enormous men again in a Mexican restaurant, quietly shoveling chips into their mouths with their bear-paw hands. After a few minutes, with a huge amount of bustling and self-important murmuring, a couple of them ushered in Alex Jones himself, installing him on a bar stool and pouring him shots of tequila.

I went over to say hello. The men looked concerned. One of them held up a hand: You can have two minutes, he told me.

Jones was red-faced and effusive. Wed never met before and I was interrupting his dinner, but he greeted me warmly. We had a brief, scattershot conversation: we talked about Trump, whom he was there to support. I asked whether he thought vaccines cause autism. I think they contribute to it, he said, nodding. (They dont.) I asked whether he considered himself woke, the slang for a politically conscious, socially aware person.

What? he asked.

I explained what it meant.

Im one hundred percent woke, Jones replied in his signature growl. He beamed at me. I am woke, he repeated. Everyone smiled at one another: the InfoWars guys, Jones, and me. One of them signaled that it was time for me to take my leave. I did.

As on the Conspira-Sea, my first reaction was to treat the exchange as a lark. It was the kind of interaction you might have with a harmless, nutty radio shock jock, because thats what Alex Jones was, for many years: a guy shouting into a microphone, warning that the government was trying to make everyone gay through covert chemical warfare, the homosexuality agents leaching into our water supply and from our plastic bottles. (Theyre turning the freaking frogs gay! he famously shouted. The clip quickly went viral and provoked mass hilarity on Twitter.)

Jones also made less adorably kooky claims: that a number of mass shootings and acts of terrorism, like the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, were faked by the government; that the CEO of Chobani, the yogurt company, was busy importing migrant rapists to work at its Idaho plant; that Hillary Clinton is an actual demon who smells of sulfur, hails from Hell itself, and has personally murdered and chopped up and raped little children.

Jones was closer to the mainstreams attention than most people on the conspiracy fringe, largely thanks to the seminal 2001 book Them by British journalist Jon Ronson, one chapter of which chronicled the pairs extremely weird adventure of trying to get into a top-secret meeting of world leaders at Bohemian Grove in Northern California. (They made it inside; memorably, Ronson beheld a bunch of those world leaders putting on childish skits and peeing on trees as a sort of boys-cutting-loose weekend. Jones, meanwhile, has always maintained that the whole thing was an occult playground for the elites and that an effigy burned during the weekend was nothing less than a bizarre pagan ritual and that the worlds most powerful people engage in ancient Canaanite Luciferian Babylon mystery religion ceremonies, as a film he made about it declared.)