Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [5]
With Christmas out of the way at retail stores, there would be nothing to stand between the American people and a deluge of godless Canadian depravity except for a few demoralized Christians in tattered green and red sweaters. Say hello to drugs, socialism, gay marriage, and Jesus-free holidays: the future of secular America.
“Superior Analysis”
A more cautious journalist might have simply reported the secular holiday activities and perhaps rebuked the government officials and corporate officers for abandoning Christmas traditions. But O’Reilly is not known for caution. He is a T-Warrior, and his chief weapons are “facts and superior analysis based on those facts.” For instance, it is a fact that the ACLU has filed First Amendment lawsuits against overtly religious Christmas displays on public property. It is also a fact that George Soros’s charitable foundation, the Open Society Institute, has donated money to the ACLU.d Based on these facts, O’Reilly employed his superior analysis to deduce that George Soros and the ACLU have a “secret plan” to destroy Christmas. Indeed, O’Reilly’s analysis is so superior that it even works with nonfacts, such as the widely circulated canard that Soros funded the liberal fact-checking website MediaMatters.org.e The site’s editors have repeatedly debunked the claim, but that did not stop O’Reilly from insisting that “smear sites” like Media Matters had joined the alleged anti-Christmas conspiracy.8
Perhaps O’Reilly’s suspicions were correct. Maybe George Soros and Peter Lewis hold regular brainstorming sessions with snickering ACLU lawyers and a pack of drooling webmasters where they plot the end of Christianity on a whiteboard over decaf soy lattes. But there is a point at which nimble analysis leaves behind the lumbering facts and enters the magical land of wild speculation, where paranoia and conspiracy frolic. Merriam-Webster defines conspiracy theory as “a theory that explains an event or set of circumstances as the result of a secret plot by usually powerful conspirators.”f Sure enough, O’Reilly had it all—the circumstances, the explanation, the secret plot, and the powerful conspirators. If he had mixed in some evil priests, secret codes, and a sexy French cryptologist, he could have made another sequel to The Da Vinci Code. (Possible titles: The Billionaire’s Secret, The Christmas Enigma, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.)
Is belief in conspiracy a symptom of paranoia? Not necessarily. Conspiracies exist, and courts often convict defendants of conspiracy to commit crimes. But to build a conspiracy case, prosecutors require evidence like paper trails, phone records, and witness testimonies, and they don’t usually declare themselves to be targets of the conspiracy. By contrast, Bill O’Reilly offered nothing to support his conspiracy accusation save a speculative motive and a record of charitable donations to a nonprofit organization that he fears and despises, having said of the ACLU, “They’re terrorizing me and my family . . . They’re putting us all in danger.”9 If baseless claims that enemies secretly conspire to persecute you and your kind constitute superior analysis, then superior analysis would seem to have much in common with paranoid delusion.
Indeed, O’Reilly’s brand of analysis is all too typical of paranoid conspiracy theory. The idea that influential villains secretly plot against ordinary men and women in a struggle to shape history carries innate psychological appeal that leads people to embrace conspiracy narratives with insufficient evidence and often in direct contradiction to available evidence. People want to believe in frightening conspiracies, and Bill O’Reilly is adept at giving people what they want.
Contrary to his boasts,