Maine professor explains how conspiracy theories pose a threat to democracy
COA James Russell Wiggins Chair in Government and Polity Jamie Mckown explores conspiracy theories and the attack on the US Capitol, WMTW reports.
In the aftermath of Wednesday’s siege of the U.S. Capitol building, many are blaming President Trump for giving credence to conspiracy theories like Q-Anon, or even his false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election.
“We often talk about conspiracy theories like an ecosystem of stories that people are inhabiting a world of and so I wouldn’t say that necessarily the people who were engaged in the violence yesterday were all part of one conspiracy theory. I think we could see multiple threads of them running together,” said Jamie McKown, a professor of political science at the College of the Atlantic.
From Q-Anon to the president’s repeated and false claims of voter fraud, McKown said some theories, though, date even farther back.
“People who are engaged in kind of conspiratorial narratives and explanations, you know, often they feel marginalized because the mainstream media and others aren’t reporting on it, but when someone in a – you know a position of authority acknowledges it, or somehow even tacitly acknowledges it, that’s like gold. That’s like pouring gasoline on the fire,” McKown said.