Lately I've been trying to get my head around why, for so long, I've been selling myself on increasingly elaborate conspiracy theories to the point where they no longer resembled anything I could back up with the available evidence.
What I discovered when I asked myself the honest question about how I got to that point was that while I was definitely outside the bounds of responsible reporting by promoting these fears, the right wing's lack of ethos is definitely a factor: I fear what I cannot trust.
What follows here is less of an excuse for all the scraps of tinfoil I left behind and more an attempt to dissect exactly what my thought process was.
It all comes down to the old conservative tactic: shirk and blame.
When conservative policies destroyed our economy, they shirked any responsibility, and blamed progressives for "socialist" policies. When crime rates skyrocket, they shirk responsibility for poorly managing cities and blame progressives for being "soft on crime."
Then there was the USA PATRIOT act, justified by fears of terrorism, followed by the Iraq War, which it's pretty clear was a war justified by a lie someone in the chain of intelligence told, though the jury's still out as to who the lying party was. That was followed closely by the 2004 elections, where the same alibis- fear of terrorism- were used in a serious and open discussion about postponing elections.
And the truth is, I did suspect something was amiss about the Iraq War from the beginning, but I didn't say anything out of fear of criticism, of being labeled a "conspiracy nut" (as was common back then for people who voiced doubts about the justification for war). And for years I kicked myself for not raising my voice more, though it's doubtful it would have made much difference.
Ever since the cloak-and-dagger intrigue of the Bush years, I have been terrified that the right wing has a plan to suspend elections and impose martial law, and perhaps this fear is not entirely unjustified though there is really no proof. More than that, though, I've been afraid that I would miss my chance to speak out when the next obvious trap, like the Iraq War, came about.
Enter Barack Obama, conservative boogeyman par excellence. Almost as soon as he became a viable candidate, the conservative talking heads were making all sorts of claims about what he would do to the country and stoking the fears of paranoid populists.
Here's where I believe I ran off the rails from monitoring a series of worrying trends to making bad predictions: I made the logical jump, based on all of the above, that the conservatives were pretty much planning to do one or all of the things they accused Obama of doing, and that their conspiracy theories were a smoke screen for their actual plans.
So I began looking at their allies, their connections, their side projects, and their past involvements and my mind went into overdrive, trying to predict their next move. I shrugged off anyone who called me a "conspiracy nut" because I thought that people were just as gullible now as they were back in 2003, and I figured I would be vindicated by history eventually.
But it's been twelve years now. I don't think I've been right about anything since the Iraq War, and looking back I wasted a lot of time and grew way too many gray hairs waiting for paranoid populists to round up socialists, Latinos, and Muslims into FEMA camps, or for Uganda's anti-gay law to become a prototype for what the religious right was going to do here in the US, or for Obama to be overthrown by the CIA, or to discover that Obama is actually a secret conservative set up as a manchurian candidate by a shadow right-wing government... need I go on?
History will not vindicate me. That's a tough pill to swallow for someone like me, after everything I've seen, but I'm not an idiot; I've been wrong too many times. I let my frustrations as a progressive and maybe an inflated sense of insight blind me to the fact that I'm not that good at seeing past curtains of conspiracy.