Conspiracy Intervention

A few days a week, while I am doing my morning weightlifting, I listen to The David Pakman Show. Pakman is a political commentator and analyst, and TDPS gets uploaded to YouTube 5 days a week. It’s usually about an hour long, and it makes for a fair portion of the editorial part of my political media diet. 

One of Mr. Pakman’s show segments is a live phone-line opportunity for anybody out there to hop into a call queue and talk to David to ask him questions. Over the past year or so, the most frequently asked question is some variation of, “how do I de-program my relative who has fallen prey to a conspiracy theory?” I think that most of us have experienced this feeling that the callers have. Maybe Aunt Margerie started posting about how her neighbor said that the COVID vaccine is going to make her magnetic. Maybe Grandpa Tom keeps posting weird anti-refugee memes. Or, more recently, it’s been lots of insanity relating to the 2020 election.

In any case, Mr. Pakman only really ever has one strategy he’s proposed as a solution to this. He refers to it as the “retail strategy” for deprogramming conspiratorial thinking. It’s an incredibly time-intensive process that effectively requires you to build a strong relationship with the person you’re trying to help, talk to them about their beliefs (A LOT), never get angry or hot-headed, and ask them tons of questions about their thought process in an effort to plant the seed of self-reflection and scientific thinking.

Recently on Mr. Pakman’s show, he had the opportunity to interview Dr. Noam Chomsky. David asked Dr. Chomsky about this very topic, pointing out that this retail strategy, while potentially effective, is so time intensive that it makes it effectively impossible to use it to affect massive change. Dr. Chomsky agreed that it was time intensive, but basically said that it was necessary and was the only way. 

I agree that it’s the only way to actively help people to work their way out of these lines of thinking. And for people who are non-confrontational or simply don’t have the energy or demeanour to handle this kind of interaction, this is sort of a non-starter. However, that’s not to say that the retail strategy is the only thing that a person can do to move the needle and stop the spread of disinformation and conspiratorial nonsense.

The analogue:

A few months ago, we had an optional training on the topic of racism in the workplace. I point out the optional nature of it, because the roster of attendees was pretty clearly bereft of the people for whom the topics of discussion would have been most beneficial. The training was discussing how to be an anti-racist, and was hosted by a handful of presenters from the consulting group that my employer had contracted to run this event.

The presentation and following discussion covered a broad range of topics, but there was only one actionable behavior introduced. The one coaching tip was that, at the bare minimum, what you have to do to be an anti-racist is to speak up in opposition when a racially unjust comment is made by somebody else. There’s no need to parade around and tout your strong allyship. There’s no need for an office-wide witch hunt. The simple way to effectively combat such behavior in the workplace is just to not let people get away with the things they say when they forget that they’re in public and their sensible instincts go out the window.

Of course this training session had me thinking about the couple times I had chosen not to say anything. My occasional choice to just avoid the conflict was potentially emboldening others. If somebody makes a racist joke and the people around them laugh, the people around them subconsciously learn that racist jokes are acceptable in the workplace. But if somebody makes a racist joke and some people laugh, but others tell them that their joke is fucked up and that if they keep up with that kind of behavior then they’re going to be facing workplace discipline for harassment, the behavior stops pretty quickly in anything but the tightest-knit of racially-insensitive circles.

How it applies:

This session also had me thinking about how conspiratorial thinking gets spread in much the same way that emboldening racism does. In any community that contains vocal activists, quiet liberals, moderate republicans, and aggressive conservatives, there is also a population of people who are, for all practical purposes, undecided. These are the silent bystanders. It’s a group made of people who are either so politically disengaged that they truly haven’t grappled with the relevant political topics or are so apathetic that they truly don’t care. I’ve noticed these people in my workplace. These might be young engineers in their mid-to-late 20s who have had every opportunity to educate themselves on topics of societal importance, but I have seen them going hook-line-and-sinker for the GOP talking points of some of our other older colleagues. 

In some capacity, this is how conspiratorial thinking spreads. If you have a young person who hasn’t spent a lot of time thinking about these topics, but somebody who they respect and admire and who holds a leadership role sends them down the conspiracy theory rabithole, the likelihood that they take the conspiracy theory seriously is greatly increased. 

A call to (very gentle) action:

This is where I think even the most timid progressive activists can make a significant impact. Simply, you just have to step in and gently intervene when you hear somebody you know spreading conspiratorial thinking. It’s a simple disarmament strategy. It doesn’t require that you go out and start a conflict. It doesn’t require that you do any investigation or dig up any dirt or stand outside with a painted sign and march. It doesn’t even require that prolonged interaction that the retail strategy of deprogramming does. Even something as simple as calmly chiming in with “that’s been proven to be false and you should fact-check that” helps more than most people realize. 

So, next time you’re standing around with 5 or 6 people and Craig from accounting gets that crazy look in his eyes and starts ranting about this morning’s FaceBook headline regarding the election audit in Arizona, calmly rebuffing it and then moving on to the next topic helps to stop that mind-virus from spreading to others who may look up to Craig.