https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/shadowland-introduction/610840/

The Conspiracy Theorists Are Winning

America is losing its grip on enlightenment values and reality itself.

The founder of the mosque, Mustafa Mahmoud himself, displayed no such complexity. I met him after prayers. He was an old man, a famous physician and philanthropist, and an Islamist of influence. His television show, Science and Faith, was watched by millions.

“I understand you want the answer,” Mahmoud said. His aides had already shared with him some of my questions, which included: Why did al-Qaeda attack America? What is the cause of their rage?

I said, Yes, I want the answer.

“Waco,” he said. I’m sure I looked baffled. Mahmoud went on, “The Branch Davidians attacked the World Trade Center, the McVeigh people. The Mossad gave them help. Did you know that the Israelis who work at the World Trade Center were told to stay home that day?” This, he said, he knew from the internet.

It was only 10 days after the attacks, and the schematic of a convoluted 9/11 conspiracy theory was already being rendered across the web. Mahmoud told me that no Arab could have executed the attacks, because Arabs “aren’t coordinated enough to do this.”

“What does bin Laden know about American air travel, anyway?” he asked. “He lives in Afghanistan.”

Eight years later, in a windowless Austin, Texas, warehouse, the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was explaining to me why he, like Mustafa Mahmoud, disbelieved the investigated and proven truth of what happened on 9/11. Jones is a top-tier conspiracist, a professional one, too, and I visited him at his headquarters to find out for myself if he actually believed the idiocy he peddled—that the government controls the weather; that Bill Gates is secretly a genocidal eugenicist. The list of absurdities has no end. It always seemed outlandish to me that otherwise smart people (Mustafa Mahmoud was one of Egypt’s leading physicians) could sincerely believe in theories that stand in opposition to logic

“Your reputation is amazing,” Donald Trump told Jones in late 2015. “I will not let you down.”

And he hasn’t. Trump does not defend our democracy from the ruinous consequences of conspiracy thinking. Instead, he embraces such thinking. A conspiracy theory—birtherism—was his pathway to power, and, in office, he warns of the threat of the “deep state” with the ferocity of a QAnon disciple. He has even begun to question the official coronavirus death toll, which he sees as evidence of a dark plot against him. How is he different from Alex Jones, from the conspiracy manufacturers of Russia and the Middle East?

He lives in the White House. That is one main difference.