Disclaimer: There is a tradition of elaborate April Fool’s Day jokes in the media. This column is not one of those. If you Google my name and “Obama birth certificate” you’ll get (a) stories around a former U.S. Senate candidate (and birther) from Alas-ka who shares my name and (b) links to the FactCheck. org article I discuss below.
In 2007, I got to be a minor character in a conspiracy theory.
I was a staff writer at FactCheck.org and then-Senator Barack Obama was running for president against John McCain.
A colleague and I were attending a conference in Chi-cago, where Obama’s cam- paign was headquartered. My colleague and I paid them a visit, during which I held a copy of Obama’s birth certificate while my colleague took photos.
What I remember most about that day was feeling embarrassed that this was an issue at all. The idea that there was some sort of dec-ade-spanning conspiracy to secretly elevate a Kenyan to the White House is patently absurd. That the rumor was sufficiently widespread to merit an actual article debunking it seemed like a death knell for American democracy.
And yet, photographing Obama’s certification of live birth – a legally binding document that the government accepts for issuing passports and Social Security cards – didn’t quell the controversy.
FactCheck received hundreds of emails accusing us of being in the pocket of the Democratic party. My colleague and I were accused of everything from being secret communists to foreign agents to paid Democratic operatives.
When I left the nonpartisan FactCheck.org to go to work for the equally nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, so-called “birthers” held it up as clear evidence of a payoff for my role in the conspiracy. (Note: as payoffs go, it was a lousy one. I worked 60-hour weeks regularly and literal members of Congress called my boss to complain about every change we made to the CBO website.)
The birther conspiracy lingered until 2011. Polls at the time showed that 25% of Americans overall and nearly 40% of Republicans believed that Obama was not a natural-born US citizen and was therefore ineligible to be president.
The controversy finally died down when Obama’s team released his full, long-form birth certificate.
Conspiracy theories have become increasingly prevalent, and eradicating one that takes root is about as easy as ridding a hillside of kudzu.
Conspiracy theories are pernicious in large part because they are unfalsifiable.
Karl Popper, one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century, famously argues that “In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable: and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.”
Popper’s claim is that any scientific claim about reality must be structured in such a way that there could be some empirical evidence that could show the claim to be false.
For example, the claim “All swans are white” is falsifiable. You can prove that it is false by locating a single non-white swan. For Popper, the claim “all swans are white” is a scientific claim about reality because it is one that is structured in such a way that there is a clear route for showing that it could be false.
“Strawberry ice cream is my favorite,” on the other hand, is not a falsifiable claim. There are no sorts of tests you could run to dem-onstrate its falsity and therefore, for Popper, it’s not a scientific claim at all.
Claims about the world that cannot be falsified aren’t claims about reality at all. They’re just expressions of attitudes – pure vibes, as the kids might say.
Conspiracy theories are like this. Much like with our photos of Obama’s birth certificate, evidence that shows a conspiracy theory to be false is reinterpreted as evidence of the conspiracy itself.
In 1998, British (now former) physician, Andrew Wakefield published an article in The Lancet alleging a link between autism and measles vaccines.
Researchers could not replicate his results. The UK’s General Medical Council (GMC) – the group responsible for licensing physicians – investigated Wakefield’s work and found that Wakefield had acted “dishonestly and irresponsibly.” When The Lancet reviewed Wakefield’s article again, its editors discovered that Wakefield misrepresented some of his data.
The Lancet retracted the paper, and the GMC revoked Wakefield’s medical license.
It is rare to find an absolute, definitive refutation of a scientific claim. A paper (a) cannot be replicated because it is (b) actually fraudulent and (c) is so egregiously fraudulent that it’s lead author is kicked out of the profession – that’s about as slam-dunk as a refutation gets.
And yet, those who continue to insist that the measles vaccine causes autism treat the Wakefield case as simply more evidence of a scientific establishment out to silence the truth.
Conspiracy theorists use the language of reasoned discourse – words like argument and evidence – but it’s pure sleight-of-hand. In practice, conspiracy theories traffic in unfalsifiable claims. All possible countervailing evidence simply counts as evidence of a coverup.
That’s not reasoning or arguing. It’s not a scientific claim about reality. It’s the expression of a preference.
It’s vibes all the way down.
joe.miller@fountaindigitalconsulting.com
