The year was 2012, and I was 16, watching Mitt Romney debate Barack Obama on TV with my stepdad, a log truck driver who’d raised me since the age of five—and whose verdict was this: “It don’t matter anyhow.” He said it, spitting his Copenhagen longcut into a Dr. Pepper can. “They already decided who’s gonna win anyway.”
He didn’t say who they were, but he didn’t need to. I’d heard the specter of they invoked my whole life by friends and family in our small East Texas town. They were planning to take away our guns. They shipped our jobs overseas. They wanted everyone to stop using cash to track our every movement. And of course, they killed Kennedy.
Americans are conspiratorial. Sixty-five percent of us believe that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone—and belief in the “official narrative” reaches majority consensus only among people with postgraduate degrees. Almost nobody believes Jeffrey Epstein killed himself. Also, Americans are suspicious of our leaders—only 22 percent of us trust the government to do what is right most or all of the time, and that figure hasn’t been at 50 percent since 1972—but we also don’t believe they have that much control. Fully 41 percent of Americans believe that “regardless of who is officially in charge of the government and other organizations, there is a single group of people who secretly control events and rule the world together.”