Excerpts: “Both conspiracy theories and actual conspiracies revolve around questions of preexisting power dynamics and the potential to shift them. Who to believe, who controls information, whose pain matters, what constitutes evidence: these questions form the nexus of the crisis of belief. Today truths are not self-evident” (p. 32).
“The boundaries between good and evil have always been blurrier than many wanted to admit. Good people can do bad things, honest people lie when they see other honest people lying, virtuous people turn vile under threat, upstanding citizens fall in line when frightened. We live in the gray area. The gray area terrifies people because it means the villain could be anyone around them. It means that the villain could, one day, be you. It is not surprising that many hearing the bad news would rather retreat into their illusions and attack the messenger” (p. 34).
“History was a feedback loop of unlearned lessons and reverberating lies” (p. 38).
“All of these developments pointed in one direction, we were living in a rapidly consolidating mafia state, one that operated according to threat instead of according to law, and our institutions were too corroded or complicit to combat it” (p. 39).
“Preemptive narrative inversion is an early propaganda intervention in which outside parties interested in an actual crime are redirected toward a fictitious crime that exonerates the actual criminals and, ideally, implicated their opponents at the same time” (p. 79).
“Those seeking to oppose criminal elites need to abandon their careerist concerns in favor of truth and justice, no matter the reputational damage they incur as a result” (p. 81).
“Like most propaganda narratives concerning corruption, it exploits ‘normalcy bias–—the idea that if a situation is truly dangerous, if massive misdeeds are being committed in plain sight, somebody would intervene and stop them. The absence of accountability and alarm lends credence to the conspirators’ claims that no serious crisis is occurring and that those claiming so are doomsayers or conspiracy theorists” (p. 105).
“It is as important to understand why people believe a lie as it is to find out why the lie was told” (p. 108-109).
“They are transaction actors, and you—all of you—are the transaction. Ordinary people are incidental to them; the United States nothing more than a land mass to be stripped and sold for parts. They are not working for the benefit of the American public, and several have stated or implied their fealty to a foreign power. But their deepest loyalty is to their money” (p. 118).
“In an emerging autocracy, hope is dangerous, because hope is inextricable from time, and an enduring strategy of autocrats is to run out the clock” (p. 132).
“You are a pawn to push, an asset to mine, and an imposition should you grasp the plan. At every step of the way, you are seen as disposable” (p. 166).
“In the unstable period before autocratic consolidation, frightened people want to follow. They do not want to think, and they do not want to be in the line of fire. It is safer not to know” (p. 198).
Kendzior, Sarah. (2022). The Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps American Complacent. New York: Flatiron Books.