Has Trump made conspiracy theories mainstream?

0:00Katie Simpson:Hi there, Steve Patterson here, host of The Debaters, the show that's part stand-up, part quiz, and all comedy. We take on the most debatable questions like, is Mother's Day superior to Father's Day? Mother's Day's coming right up, so you gotta remember the moms in your life. And listen to this week's episode of The Debaters wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast.

0:22Willy Lowry:Willie, Katie, what's the wackiest conspiracy theory you've had to read up on since becoming a Washington correspondent? Katie, you first. Go.

0:33Paul Hunter:Picture this. It is a Saturday in late November in 2020. I am in Washington at a stop the steal rally when a woman insists to me that the reason Joe Biden won the 2020 election is that dogs in Michigan, people's pets, voted. And that's why Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. And she was dead serious. She looked me straight in the eye and I'm like, I don't even know what to do with that. And that was just at the start of conspiracy theories around the 2020 election.

1:13Katie Simpson:Really? Well, that's amazing. And I do sometimes, you know, the world is probably better if seen through the eyes of our dogs. But, you know, they're like where to start. There are so many. I mean, for me, I moved in January 2021, and my first few years here felt like it was spent almost entirely batting down one QAnon theory after the other. I mean, of course, the one that really stands out is Pizzagate from 2016, of course, referencing or alluding to an allegation that Hillary Clinton was running a pedophile ring out of the basement of a pizza restaurant here in Washington. One of my favorite moments since living here was going to a birthday party for my child and realizing it was in said basement at Comet Ping Pong Pizza.

2:08Katie Simpson:Yeah, great little joint.

2:10Willy Lowry:Listen, today we're going to talk about conspiracy theories because understanding them has become an inescapable part of the job we do here. And now the Trump administration is regularly, or so it seems, engaging with fringe ideas and conspiracy theories. So today we're asking, has Trump made conspiracy mainstream and why that matters? I'm Paul Hunter.

2:34Paul Hunter:I'm Katie Simpson.

2:36Katie Simpson:And I'm Willie Lowry. We're CBC's Washington Correspondence, two blocks from the White House.

2:48Willy Lowry:Katie, let's start with you. I mean, how important is it for political reporters to keep an eye on the conspiracy theories in today's landscape?

3:01Paul Hunter:So I don't know if Canadians are going to realize this. But anytime I go out on an assignment outside of Washington, D.C., and I'm going to do some political reporting, I make sure that I am up to speed on whatever the biggest and most prominent conspiracy theories are based on political leanings. So if I'm going into an environment where I'm talking to Trump voters, I need to know what the MAGA base is talking about. If I'm going into an environment where I'm going to talk to Democratic voters and lean progressive, I need to know what they're talking about. And it's very different territory. but because they are so mainstream that I have to equip myself and arm myself with this information because I'm likely going to encounter it.

3:51Paul Hunter:So, you know, if it's on the right side, on the MAGA side, it's about election fraud. It can be about a whole host of things that Donald Trump really talks about quite frequently. On some of the conspiracy theories that I've sort of had to sort of navigate on the left side, maybe for Democratic voters, a lot of it has to do with whatever it is the president says, particularly about his health. They don't believe what's going on with his health. They think the White House is lying about that. And there are legitimate questions about what is going on with the president's health. But those kinds of things, and it's so mainstream that you have to be prepared to navigate it when you are going out into, you know, the rest of America outside of Washington, D.C.

4:30Paul Hunter:and talking to American voters.

4:31Willy Lowry:Because, you know, we've talked at various times about, you know, working the line at a Trump rally and trying to understand the MAGA thing. And it's complicated because they are true believers. And it's the same with conspiracies, right? It's hard to have a conversation because there is no conversation to be had because people who believe truly believe.

4:55Katie Simpson:That complicates our job. There's no dissuading. Not that it's necessarily a journalist's job to dissuade. No. Correct. That's a good way to put it.

5:04Paul Hunter:I agree with that. I very much agree with that. I don't see it as my role as a journalist going into this place where if conspiracy theories are being shared, it is not my job to be, hey, you're wrong. And this is like because it's that scolding. No, I'm here to report on what is happening in America. And if Americans are talking about this, it's my job to put it into context for a Canadian audience to say, hey, these people are saying X, Y, Z. Here's what's true. Here's what's not true and put it in context so Canadians can better understand what's happening in America. But I'm not going to sit there and lecture some person about, you know, well, this conspiracy theory is wrong and da-da-da.

5:38Paul Hunter:Like I'm not going to certainly do that.

5:41Katie Simpson:Yeah, and for two reasons, right? One, you're never going to leave that place, right? Like those conversations are often just circular. But also, as you were suggesting, it's kind of our job to absorb and absorb that into our understanding of this place and then find and reflect that in our reporting.

6:00Paul Hunter:Yeah. And Paul, some of your reporting lately on The National, on Your World Tonight, you've been touching on some of these things that are hotbeds for conspiracy theories, you know, unidentified flying objects who have gone through a glow up. Now they're called UAPs instead of UFOs. And missing scientists. Here's the thing. I am. I am. I did a doc once on the UFO UAP. It's like a whole glow up and a branding thing. But anyway, but Paul, you've had to do this too recently.

6:28Willy Lowry:Yeah, what a break from the regular cut and thrust of this place. Well, I almost did a story on the missing scientists and I did do a piece on the UFOs. Both have presidential connections, which I think legit draws it into this conversation. Which one first? Let's do UFOs first. As he promised a long time ago, Donald Trump approved the release of a whack of files on UFO, UAP sightings and things like this. As you can attest, Katie, it was delicious stuff and it proved absolutely nothing, right? And that was sort of the fun of it. Okay, we still don't know even though all this stuff. And yet that conspiracy theory, if that's the right way to put it, I guess, that UFOs are a thing and exist and we've been visited, it persists, right?

7:19Willy Lowry:Let's go to Barack Obama for a second. Not too long ago, he said, tongue in cheek, that effectively speaking, they are real or that he thinks they are somewhere out there. But he was not saying that their bodies exist in a warehouse in Ohio or someplace. Right. It got to the point where, I mean, Obama's got the presidential library open up in Chicago. He's doing the rounds of interview shows. And he was on with Stephen Colbert. And Colbert asked him to clarify his comments on whether UFOs are real. Here's a bit of that. Here's the thing. Uh-huh. For those of you who still think that, you know, we've got little green men underground somewhere.

8:00Willy Lowry:Yeah. One of the things you learn as president. Yes. Is. Government is terrible at keeping secrets. This idea of conspiracy theories. If if there were aliens or alien spaceships or anything under the control of the United States government that we knew about, seen photographs, what have you. And I promise you, some guy guarding the installation would have taken a selfie with one of the aliens and sent it to his girlfriend and present. Right. And that's the thing like that. That's the perfect debunker of of that conspiracy. Surely to God, the government is terrible at keeping secrets and it could not have been keeping this secret like JFK and all that kind of stuff.

8:48Willy Lowry:It stretches credulity to think that these things could be kept secret, as Obama said. Now, the missing scientists is a whole other thing. We were going to do a piece on this, and then the White House Correspondents' Dinner shooting happened, and this got sort of punted down the line. We may or may not get to it in the end. But the story is that there's a whole bunch of, you know, scientists and researchers in America who've been found mysteriously dead or have gone missing. And that brought this conspiracy theory that there must be some connection here. Maybe China's behind it. Maybe Russia's behind it.

9:24Willy Lowry:But the difference here is that Donald Trump, in a sense, gave it oxygen by, I think, in a chopper talk one day saying that he had just come from a security meeting on it. It was referred to the FBI. All of a sudden, it's making headlines everywhere. And that affects us because then how can you – if the president of the United States is saying maybe there's something to this, you're left as a journalist thinking, well, that's the president of the United States. So maybe there's something to this. And then we have to do news stories on it and becomes a kind of a circular thing where that feeds upon itself.

10:00Willy Lowry:And thus is born a conspiracy theory, which, by the way, eventually Trump himself sort of debunked.

10:06Paul Hunter:Anytime that Donald Trump or any U.S. president speaks, the assumption is that the White House or the intelligence community has provided information to the president because he has access to the most information in the world of any other human being on the planet. And so when he says something, I know that we are in a moment right now with the president that has a very different relationship with the truth. But so do all presidents if we're going to really get into it. That sounds a little conspiratorial. Exactly, right? Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. But to Paul, to your earlier point about Barack Obama and, you know, the government is really bad at keeping secrets.

10:42Paul Hunter:I was told once by a very senior staffer who worked in the Trudeau government years ago, and he couldn't stop laughing. He starts saying, you know, conspiracy theories. And he would talk about how people who thought that the government was, you know, engaging in conspiracy theories. And he said to me, Katie, we can't even do what we're trying to do. How do you think we are going to carry out things secretly? We have stated these objectives of the things we want to do, and we can't even do that. And that always sort of stuck with me. That, and he also described that if, when they were hiring new people to come into, whether it be like the prime minister's office or senior government sort of staffers on the political side, they'd ask particularly the young people, you know, what impression do you have of government and like what it's like to work in a political office?

11:33Paul Hunter:And they would say if they said the West Wing, it was not going to be a hire that's going to fit. But if you said Veep, because what is government life really like? It's actually like Veep. Everything is a mess. Nothing is actually happening the way you want it to happen. And it's all over the map. It's all over the map.

11:50Willy Lowry:But it is all happening in this kind of post-truth world. And this, again, complicates life for journalists in this city because you don't know what to believe. And, you know, the first thing I thought when you mentioned that a couple of minutes ago was sunshine and bleach as a cure for covid. I was, you know, on the air on News Network when Trump said that and had to come out of it and say, like, like, is that does he know stuff that we don't know? Like, is he because he is privy to all this because he's the president again. And this is why, be they conspiracy theories, which seem to be everywhere these days, or just straight up comments from the president when the president gives oxygen to conspiracy theories or says stuff like sunshine is a potential cure for covid.

12:38Willy Lowry:Like, what do you do with that? I don't I don't know the answer.

12:42Paul Hunter:I think at this point, I'm going to start trying some sunshine and bleach because that's why I'm not in the office right now. I've got a really, I don't have COVID, but I have a really bad cold. Sunshine is good for you, Katie. It is a beautiful day, Katie.

12:52Katie Simpson:So I do suggest getting outside and soaking in some rays.

12:57Paul Hunter:If you're watching us on YouTube and wondering why I'm not in the studio, it's because I've got a bad cold and I don't want to make everyone in the office sick. But that's where we are, at least at this point. You know, and the conspiracy theories, they pop up so quickly because of this because of social media, people immediately have access to just say whatever they want, whatever they want. And great. Awesome. Great. But it does have an impact on on conspiracy theories. And Willie, you know, almost immediately, almost immediately after the shooting of the White House Correspondents dinner, you know, conspiracy theories just sort of spread like wildfire on social media.

13:34Katie Simpson:Yeah, abound almost instantaneously. A lot of them kind of suggesting that this whole thing was staged. Some suggesting that it was staged by the president himself. Because he was low in the polls. Exactly. So one survey that I read, and this is like crazy here, suggests that one in four Americans believe it was staged. For the White House Correspondents Dinner, one in three Democrats that were polled thought it was staged, one in eight Republicans. So again, these conspiracies go both ways. Both the right and the left are susceptible to them.

14:23Katie Simpson:Hey, if someone calls you and you don't recognize the number, answer it because it might be Adam Sandler. That's what Chandler Levesque's agent said to her a couple of years ago. So I like unlock my phone. I'm like, hello. And the voice is like, Chandler. It's the real Adam Sandler voice? He's like, this is Adam Sandler. And I love I Like Movies, man. That's a really good movie. Chandler Levesque, the director of I Like Movies, the new movie Myland Kicks, and the new movie Roommates, produced by Adam Sandler. Hear that interview now to search for Q with Tom Power wherever you get your podcasts.

14:58Paul Hunter:Why do we think this is happening, though? Like, why? Like, what moment are we in that makes this, like, why this is happening now and people see things and just don't believe it?

15:08Katie Simpson:I mean, it's a great question. I think social media has – It allows it. It allows it to just spread so much farther than in eras past. But also there's something about the printed word and when I say the printed word, I mean text on a screen even that kind of gives things credence in a way, I believe. And I think reading something kind of makes it seem more believable. And people are reading – you know, there's – social media is very much unfiltered for the most part, right? So these conspiracy theories are allowed to propagate and kind of spread and then they're consumed. Two things. One, I will say – I mean I was at the White House Correspondence Dinner.

15:52Katie Simpson:Yes, I was going to ask.

15:54Willy Lowry:It was real, right? It was real.

15:58Paul Hunter:As real as the cheese and crackers at the end of the day.

16:01Willy Lowry:As real as the cheese and crackers. They were delicious, I'm just going to say. I want to say that that was whispered in the room. And I don't know now whether I'm misremembering because it was the story that it did pop up so quickly. But I want to say that I feel people were talking about it even then just as a – well, that was convenient timing, wasn't it? But that's part of the conspiracy theory. But to be fair to journalists, as a general kind of feeling, we're pretty much cynics. I spoke with the widow of one of the dead scientists who was Canadian living in San Diego. And his widow was also obviously, well, maybe not obviously, but whose widow was also Canadian.