Letters to the Editor: Should We Ignore Conspiracy Theories?

Welcome back to Letters to the Editor. Today, we bring you readers’ thoughts on whether investigating a conspiracy theory legitimizes it; the relationship between education and activism; and the dangers of glamorizing psychedelics.

As you’ll see below, we are committed to facilitating robust debate in our pages. If you have thoughts on something we’ve published, we want to know. Please write to us at Letters@TheFP.com. 

A few days before the election, we published an investigation by Peter Savodnik into the GOP talking point—spread most emphatically by Elon Musk himself—that Democrats are rigging the vote through illegal immigration.

“No one making these claims that I spoke to—and I spoke to five leading voices from conservative think tanks—has produced any smoking guns: an email from the Harris campaign, leaked audio or video, an incriminating text,” wrote Peter, while examining the various Republican claims.

Friend of The Free Press Jesse Singal thought the piece did not adequately guard against the dangers of reporting on this “noxious and incendiary” conspiracy theory. 

Today, we’re printing both Jesse’s letter—a version of which originally appeared on his Substack—and Peter’s response to it. Here’s Jesse:

As a fan of and contributor to The Free Press, I was disappointed in Peter Savodnik’s article “Is There Really a Plot to Use Migrants to Turn America Blue?” As I noted in my newsletter, this claim is a variant of the Great Replacement, an unfortunately widespread conspiracy theory both here and in Europe, which suggests that in certain places elites are plotting to import non-whites to politically disempower the native white population. As an idea, it is exceptionally noxious and incendiary, and it has helped to motivate heinous acts, such as the 2022 mass shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, perpetrated by a white supremacist. Not everyone who believes in the Great Replacement is a Nazi or white supremacist, but it is a mainstay of Nazi and white supremacist propaganda.

I suppose anything’s possible, but in the absence of new, substantive evidence supporting this theory, an outlet with as large a reach as The Free Press simply should not be humoring and disseminating it. And Savodnik’s article presents no meaningful new evidence to suggest a Democratic plot to import illegal immigrants and turn them into voters. Instead, it’s a mix of, on the one hand, well-known facts about the migration crisis and Democratic gloating about “demographic destiny” (which proved delusional years ago, given Republican gains among non-white voters), and on the other, a great deal of Trumpian “people are saying.” 

The “people” doing the saying, in this case, are inherently untrustworthy. Savodnik cites a film by Nate Hochman, a young right-winger who was fired by the Ron DeSantis campaign for sneaking a sonnenrad—a neo-Nazi symbol also worn by the Buffalo shooter—into one of his videos. He also cites content from Real America’s Voice, which back in 2018 and 2019 aggressively pushed QAnon, a conspiracy theory so deranged it makes the Great Replacement look tame by comparison. 

While Savodnik doesn’t entirely ignore the evidence against the Great Replacement Theory, he devotes far more space to the claims of its believers; in fact, the overall effect of the piece is to legitimize this conspiracy theory as reasonable. Immigration and migration are perfectly reasonable subjects for The Free Press to cover. But given that migrants are human beings, whatever one thinks of the policies that bring them here, this subject needs to be covered with rigor and skepticism.

Even if one isn’t moved by my moral argument, it is tactically foolish to publish slipshod work on this subject, in a world where some progressives treat any discussion of these subjects as inherently racist. Why give them the ammo, in other words?

Here, Peter responds to Jesse’s letter: