Jones had so twisted people with guilt that to think at all was to be elitist. To perceive that not all was right in Jonestown was to be anarchistic. Even without Jones’s constant reminders of Jonestown’s beauty, these people had conditioned themselves to shut out the bad. They had given up so much to come to Jonestown that to even contemplate trouble in paradise would be incapacitating. It was far easier to blame themselves for failing to be contented amid impossible surroundings.

Now, when you engage in cooperative activity with peers in an environment that you do not realize is artificially constructed, you do not perceive your interactions to be coerced. And when you are encouraged but not forced to make verbal claims to "truly understanding the ideology and having been transformed," these interactions with your peers will tend to lead you to conclude that you hold beliefs consistent with your actions. In other words, you will think that you came upon the belief and behaviors yourself.
Peer pressure is very important to this process:

• If you say it in front of others, you'll do it.
• Once you do it, you'll think it.
• Once you think it (in an environment you do not perceive to be coercive), you'll believe that you thought it yourself.

In working with several thousand individuals who have been in cults, I have not been told by one of them that she or he went out looking for a guru to set her or him up in prostitution, flower selling, cocaine dealing, gun smuggling, child abuse, or living of garbage, which were the ways these various individuals had ended up while in the cult. They had not been seeking that.

With all conspiracism, classic and new, the counterstrategy of speaking truth runs up against the wall of closed minds. With classic conspiracism—the kind that collects evidence, that tries to connect all the dots, that offers theories and explanations—speaking truth to conspiracy is often ineffective. The conspiracist’s sealed mind-set is resistant to intervention. Conspiracists categorize contrary evidence as part of the conspiracy itself, and competing evidence is especially suspect when it comes from the very sources said to be part of the plan: political officials or government commissions or the mainstream press. These qualities of mind—epistemic closure, or a self-sealing resistance to all challenging facts—also make the new conspiracism difficult to correct and contest. It is all the more difficult in the case of the new conspiracism because so often the “evidence” consists only of bare assertion, “a lot of people are saying.” In addition, there’s the tribal element of the new conspiracism: identification with a group for which conspiracist stories are a regular way of viewing the political world. The tribal element imposes a real cost on changing one’s mind. Call it the reputational obstacle to acknowledging false belief.

...the new conspiracism is a special kind of assault, and it poses a distinctive challenge beyond its specific targets. It is disturbing and dangerous because it is a direct, explicit, and wholesale attack on shared modes of understanding and explaining things in the political world. It unsettles the ground on which we argue, negotiate, compromise, and even disagree. It makes democracy unworkable—and ultimately it makes democracy seem unworthy.

The new conspiracists do not necessarily believe what they say. But they do not disbelieve it either. As we have argued, classic conspiracy theory is about making sense of the world. But to assent in the way the new conspiracists do is something different. Their assent is forceful and has the stamp of certainty—the election was “rigged!” But when probed, the language of certainty often gives way to the language of “true enough.” And “true enough” is good enough politically. Because the weak ground of assent does not cause hesitation or humility. It is not a barrier to publicly asserting emphatic claims about reality. It does not inhibit conspiracists from claiming to own reality. And for conspiracists in power, it is not an impediment to imposing their reality on the nation.

What validates the new conspiracism is not evidence but repetition. When Trump tweeted the accusation that President Barack Obama had ordered the FBI to tap his phones in October before the 2016 election, no evidence of the charge was forthcoming. What mattered was not evidence but the number of retweets the president’s post would enjoy: the more retweets, the more credible the charge. Forwarding, reposting, retweeting, and “liking”: these are how doubts are instilled and accusations are validated in the new media. The new conspiracism—all accusation, no evidence—substitutes social validation for scientific validation: if a lot of people are saying it, to use Trump’s signature phrase, then it is true enough.

Warranted or not, classic conspiracism is conspiracy with a theory. The new conspiracism is something different. There is no punctilious demand for proofs, no exhaustive amassing of evidence, no dots revealed to form a pattern, no close examination of the operators plotting in the shadows. The new conspiracism dispenses with the burden of explanation. Instead, we have innuendo and verbal gesture: “A lot of people are saying …” Or we have bare assertion: “Rigged!”—a one-word exclamation that evokes fantastic schemes, sinister motives, and the awesome capacity to mobilize three million illegal voters to support Hillary Clinton for president. This is conspiracy without the theory.

We always holds its challengers to ethical standards (such as objectivity) that it does not itself feel obliged to meet, because the original owners of we have a monopoly on morality and the privilege of being the real voice of the masses. End of story. Critical voices become so paralysed that they don’t notice that the ‘respect’ we demand of them is actually an unquestioning silence.

A new we is emerging. A we that probably does not include you, the worried reader of this book.

This is the potential nightmare of the new media: the idea that our data might know more about us than we do, and that this is then being used to influence us without our knowledge. What’s unsettling isn’t so much that ‘they’ know something about me that I considered private, hidden – though that’s unpleasant, it’s also somehow comforting, reinforcing the idea that there’s a stable ‘me’ I am fully aware of, to protect me from ‘them’; more disconcerting is the idea that ‘they’ know something about me which I hadn’t realised myself, that I’m not who I think I am – one’s complete dissipation into data that is now being manipulated by someone else.

During glasnost, it seemed like the truth would set everybody free. Dictators appeared so afraid of the truth they had it suppressed. But something drastic has gone wrong. We have access to more information and evidence than ever, but facts seem to have lost their power. There is nothing new in politicians lying, but what seems novel is that they seem to be making a thing out of showing that they don’t care about whether they tell the truth or not. When Vladimir Putin went on international television during his army’s annexation of Crimea and asserted, with a smirk, that there were no Russian soldiers in Crimea, when everyone knew there were, and later, just as casually, admitted that they had been there, he wasn’t so much lying in the sense of trying to replace one reality with another as saying that facts don’t matter. Similarly the president of the United States, Donald Trump, is famous for having no discernible notion of what truth or facts are, yet this has in no way been a barrier to his success. According to the fact-checking agency PolitiFact, 76 per cent of his statements in the 2016 presidential election were ‘mostly false’ or down-right untrue, compared to 27 per cent for his rival. He still won.

When one hears so many stories of fake accounts that seem to be supporting freedoms and civil rights, but which in fact turn out to be nothing of the sort, one starts doing a double take at everything one encounters online. Is that American civil rights poster over there actually being run out of St Petersburg? Is anything what it says? When the Kremlin crawls inside American protest movements online, the very notion of genuine protest starts to be eroded. Getting caught is half the point, making it easier for the Kremlin to argue that all protests everywhere are just covert foreign influence operations.

Today bots, trolls and cyborgs could create the simulation of a climate of opinion, of support or hate, which was more insidious, more all-enveloping than the old broadcast media. And this simulation would then become reinforced as people modified their behaviour to fall in line with what they thought was reality. In their analysis of the role of bots, researchers at the University of Oxford called this process ‘manufacturing consensus’. It is not the case that one online account changes someone’s mind; it’s that en masse they create an ersatz normality. Over the decades there have been many studies showing how people modify their behaviour to fit in with what they think is the majority point of view. In 1974 a German political scientist and pollster called Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann looked into research that showed how people will go along with the majority opinion in order to fit in. The need to belong is one of the deepest human inclinations, Noelle-Neumann argued, and people are motivated by fear of isolation; that is why exile, expulsion from the group, is one of the oldest forms of punishment.

...if all the world is a conspiracy, then your own failures are no longer all your fault. The fact that you achieved less than you hoped for, that your life is a mess – it’s all the fault of the conspiracy. More importantly, conspiracy is a way to maintain control. In a world where even the most authoritarian regimes struggle to impose censorship, one has to surround audiences with so much cynicism about anybody’s motives, persuade them that behind every seemingly benign motivation is a nefarious, if impossible-to-prove, plot, that they lose faith in the possibility of an alternative, a tactic a renowned Russian media analyst called Vasily Gatov calls ‘white jamming’.

The meaning of each election is the promise of the next one.

There is an irony here. It used to be a vision of the Left that politics was about freeing people from shackles which had been imposed on them by dint of their birth [...] But for many people on the Left, the dream seems to have been rejected. It is somehow too entangled with the Enlightenment project, too modernist, too "Western." For some reason Western intellectuals, and many non-Western too, have decided that people in the Third World do not want or like freedom or change, that 'authentic' Third World people prefer ancient communal ties and oneness with the earth. They tell them to be what they were born, and stay what they were born, on pain of being accused of inauthenticity and mental colonization.

Equality, the imams and priests solemnly repeat, does not mean sameness. No, to be sure, it doesn't, but it does generally mean sameness of treatment, sameness of laws, sameness of opportunities, sameness of rights. What it does not mean - what it is generally taken to rule out - is instruction from the authorities on what kind of work one can and cannot attempt, what kind of life one can and cannot chose.

These religious authorities and conservative clerics worship a wretchedly cruel unjust vindictive executioner of a God. They worship a God of 10-year-old boys, a God of rapists, of gangs, of pimps.
They worship - despite rhetoric about justice and compassion and agapē - a God who sides with the strong against the weak, a God who cheers for privilege and punishes egalitarianism. They worship a God who is male and who gangs up with other males against women. They worship a thug.
They worship a God who thinks little girls should be married to grown men. They worship a God who looks on in approval when a grown man rapes a child because he is 'married' to her. They worship a God who thinks a woman should receive 80 lashes with a whip because her hair wasn't completely covered. They worship a God who is pleased when three brothers hack their sisters to death with axes because one of them married without their father's permission.

Almost everybody in the campaign, still an extremely small outfit, thought of themselves as a clear-eyed team, as realistic about their prospects as perhaps any in politics. The unspoken agreement among them: not only would Donald Trump not be president, he should probably not be. Conveniently, the former conviction meant nobody had to deal with the latter issue.