Opinion Analysis by Naif al-Rogi, Staff Writer

December 17th, 2020

There is a shadow war being waged across the world. Deep State agents are engaged in a most heinous plot to steal the U.S. elections for their Satanic masters as I type this, with a firefight at a top-secret CIA server farm in Frankfurt, Germany, concealing evidence of mass election fraud being just the latest skirmish between Good and Evil. So tells us retired three-star General Thomas G. McInerny, former U.S. Air Force assistant vice chief of staff – doubtless a reliable source, if there ever was one. Or maybe not necessarily. 

McInerny, like all too many of his fellow Americans, has slipped into a state of conspiratorial paranoia, seeing shadows around every corner, and occultic child-trafficking rings behind every news item. Alarmingly, though not at all surprising, at least one third of Americans are just as conspiracy addled as the general. ‘QAnon’, a rather interesting albeit deranged theory holds that a shrouded pedophilic cabal aims to control humanity, and our best and last hope is one Donald J. Trump (hold your laughter). Acolytes of the Truth get regulars updates from an anonymous Q, who not unlike a latter-day Martin Luther posts his bulletins on internet boards, initially 4Chan’s /pol/, and like in every religious movement, sectarianism sprouts out. There now appear to be several Qs, each claiming to be a renegade on the inside, trying to subvert the Deep State from within. It could be quite rightly said that at least a third of Americans, then, live in wholly different reality, one with its own alternate history.

As an Arab on the outside looking in, there is a feeling—I must confess—of schadenfreude. That the East is hopelessly irrational and intrinsically given to superstition is a well-established orientalist trope. The conceit is in fact so pervasive, that many Arabs and Middle Easterners have it dutifully internalized. Take Turki Al-Hamad for instance, who is what some might deem an intellectual in our region; he writes confidently that conspiracy theorizing is something inherent in Arab and Islamic political cultures. The West, by contrast, is projected as being coolly scientific and rational. Self-flagellation counts as serious and thoughtful commentary here—a harsher indictment, I should say, of Arab political culture than any tendency for conspiracy thinking. Arabs can justifiably, at any rate, point to their history of being repeatedly conspired against, with new revelations coming out every so often to the point where it seems only tragically comical.

As for rational America, their most recent congressional intake includes not one but two new members who campaigned on and expressed a belief in ‘QAnon’, both naturally Republican. Given that a sizeable chunk of the population believes, with varying degrees of lucidity, in an overarching grand conspiracy, it does politicians no good ignoring them. After all, everyone gets a vote, and here is a constituency that demands servicing. Much has been made of the ‘paranoid style in American politics’ lately, but what exactly engenders it? I suspect that a sort of American exceptionalism is at play here, for one can hardly say that they are unique in this regard; what a comforting fact it is to know, that everyone, everywhere is a mere spell away from madness. Trump and the Republicans are not the only ones who have depended on cranks and paranoiacs to see them through. Recall the abiding suspicions among liberal Americans that Trump is one way or another a Russian stooge, which continue to subsist despite the heavily-anticipated Mueller Report finding no evidence for it. A useful parallel can be drawn here—both sides rather appeal to the extraordinary than cope with reality.

To be sure, there are elite cabals, and they do run much of the world. Whether they ritually sacrifice children or not I suppose is neither here nor there. There is an expectation by the masses that those who run the show must be fiendishly cunning and wicked. It will be a great disappointment for those who would have it otherwise to discover that in place of maliciousness there is but mediocrity. In the Arab world, one finds it a habit to lament that this allegedly hereditary schizophrenia has hampered our development. The American experience somewhat discounts this, however. 

Conspiracy culture, as it were, carries with it a social element in America that one does not see in the Arab world; I should think because of America’s individualistic society as opposed to our more communal ones. This makes enough sense yet does not explain it entirely. The internet has let people find each other, become fellow travelers down inscrutably winding paths, and let the wildest theories fester. Handwringing over ‘fake news’ does nothing to swell the tide, and we can expect initiates who cut their teeth online today to be members of congress tomorrow. Eventually, realties will meld together, and children fifty years from now will learn all about the Battle of Frankfurt.