How Tech Billionaires and Online Extremists Made Conspiracies Go Mainstream

Susan J. Demas

On the National Mall, as a severe storm bore down on Trump’s July Fourth celebration of America’s 250th birthday, Secret Service agents ordered the crowd to evacuate. Several hundred people refused. Some argued with the agents. A cluster of people ran back toward the stage. An officer repeated the order through a bullhorn; the crowd booed. Many started chanting, “U.S.A., U.S.A.”

One man offered his explanation to a New York Times reporter on the scene: the storm warning was the work of “liberals in the weather service.” He thought the whole thing was “baloney.”

The storm was real. All you had to do was look up at the sky.

But this is where we are — a political movement so thoroughly marinated in institutional distrust that, faced with an evacuation order from the Secret Service because a violent thunderstorm is approaching, a meaningful number of people’s first instinct is to assume a conspiracy. Not to look at what was in front of their own eyes. Not to trust the agents whose job is to keep them alive. To assume that the deep state has infiltrated the National Weather Service and manufactured a storm warning to ruin Dear Leader’s rally.

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