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Twenty-seven years ago I taught an Intercession class at Johns Hopkins University: “American Paranoia.” Over the course of three weeks in January 1998, about a dozen students and I read and watched the classics: Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Crying of Lot 49, The Parallax View and The Conversation, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” and The X-Files. This was a time when paranoia and conspiracies could be treated gently, amusedly; they had not yet evolved into brain-breaking, planet-wrecking diseases afflicting hundreds of millions of people.

I don’t remember too much of what we discussed, but I remember this: The fundamental property of a conspiracy theory—the quality that gives it its power and mystique—is that it cannot be proven. Every fact you think you can verify is either a single sketchy rung of a ladder leading deeper into darkness, or a red herring designed to distract and obfuscate. Which is why the facts don’t matter. They only get in the way of the compelling mythology, the one that allows us each to imagine ourselves as its seers and oracles. Facts ruin conspiracy theories: Conspiracies encourage us to squint at reality, hoping to catch the light and the angle that will reveal its true, divine form, but if and when it does resolve, it turns out that reality is just the reality we’ve always known, shopworn and unexceptional. This is why fictions like Lost were so disappointing—the “facts” behind the mystery could never live up to the glory of the mystery—and why writers like Thomas Pynchon and Raymond Carver were successful: because their characters only ever got a brief glimpse behind the curtain, enough to know that inscrutable beings with unknowable (if venal) motives would forever pull the strings. Their works end with a feeling that blends satisfaction and dissatisfaction. Their truths lie within your grasp, but just beyond your grasp, always beyond your grasp.

I bring all this up because this country, the United States of America, is now ruled by conspiracy theorists who do not understand this one essential point: There are no conspiracies.

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Conspiracies are hard. Really hard. It’s difficult to get a half-dozen people to work together for a common goal, let alone to do so in secret. The moon landing, for example, employed close to a quarter of a million people; for all of them to have kept silent in the decades since is unimaginable. No one—not Nixon, not George Soros, not Jesus F. Christ—could compel the confidence of so many people for so long.

And because they are hard, conspiracies are also nonsensical. Take the common 9/11 conspiracy theory that the attacks were staged so that President George W. Bush could go to war with Iraq and avenge his father. If that was the case, then the “plan” was this: We train 19 (or 20) jihadis, most of them Saudi, in the U.S. for months, arm them with box cutters that could easily have been blocked by airport security, have them hijack planes and fly them into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, set explosives in the World Trade Center just to make sure the towers go down, then a month or so later invade not Iraq but Afghanistan, and only eventually, a year or two later, fabricate evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction in order to justify an invasion of that country and seize its oil—or, wait, not seize its oil. What moron greenlighted this plan? Why was the first part of it, so riddled with potential failures, necessary at all? Why not skip to the fabricated WMD evidence and go from there?

To believe in conspiracies like this is to believe there are people on this planet who are both infinitely powerful and bottomlessly stupid.

And now the bottomlessly stupid are running the show, fantasizing that left-wing forces, shrouded in darkness and with unchecked power, have for decades been committing atrocities against the United States under the guise of “good government” and “science” and “professionalism.” They believe, with all the religious gullibility of the desperate naïf, that there is a conspiracy of astounding sweep, and that only they can unveil and destroy it.

Look, I’m not here to change their minds. They’re not reading this reasonably high-quality newsletter—nor could they, reading comprehension being beyond their meager abilities.

But in these times of trouble, I do want to caution you, my dear subscribers, both paid and free, not to fall into a similar trap. It is easy and intoxicating to ascribe sophisticated motives to the people running and ruining our country and our world: that they are engaged in a game of four-dimensional chess, dictated by Vladimir Putin, fueled by ketamine dealers, and in thrall to golden-shower hookers, in order to rig elections and bring about a Christian nationalist vision of biblical apocalypse. Or something like that, anyway—you can choose your own weirdly satisfying variation.

But this is not what’s going on. The motives and tactics are simple: They are greedy, and they just don’t anyone want telling them what they can or can’t, should or shouldn’t, do. They are toddlers.

The evidence, meanwhile, is not hidden away in boardrooms, on billion-dollar yachts, in elite prayer circles. There is no conspiracy: It’s all done in public. Their words are recorded, their actions are visible. You don’t need any special knowledge to see and understand what they’re up to—they’ll tell you and show you. They want to disassemble the administrative state. They don’t want government to support anyone who isn’t them, or with them. They are taking everything apart, not to make something new, different, more effective, but to take it apart, remove it from existence altogether. They want a world where they own everything, including the facts.

I don’t know how to stop them. But I do know we cannot allow ourselves to think like them, to allow conspiratorial theorizing to pollute our brains as it has theirs. If there is a fundamental difference between them and us, it is that we accept reality—accept, not believe—and its attendant facts, and can amass solid, verifiable evidence of their crimes, both legal and moral, in ways that will, I hope, ultimately persuade all the people with whom we share this land and this planet.

This is not to say that they have no secrets, that we already know all there is to know. Their secrets do certainly exist. Their secrets are small, and telling, and embarrassing, and they must be uncovered by diligent journalists and brave whistleblowers and former true believers who’ve chosen to listen to their conscience rather than to the siren song of greed. Those secrets, however, are not codes to unlock ever greater mysteries—they’re more facts, inarguable facets of reality that we will use to wake the world up and bring the bastards down.

The truth, in other words, is not out there—it’s right here, in front of our faces. All it takes to see it is clear eyes and a strong stomach. 🪨🪨🪨

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