- An alarming number of Americans are receptive to the lure of conspiracy theories.

Today's guest unpacks the appeal of hidden knowledge and what those stories tell us about current American politics.

He's Stephen Clermont, this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(bright music) (bright music continues) (bright music fades out) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from The Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salve's Pell Center.

- And our guest this week is an experienced political pollster who has studied public opinion for more than 30 years.

Now Stephen Clermont is the head of polling at Change Research and he joins us today from Washington, D.C.

Steven, welcome to the show.

- Oh, thank you, thank you, Jim, thank you, Wayne, thanks for having me.

- You know, so you and your colleagues at Change Research conducted some really interesting polling earlier this summer that we thought would be of interest to our audience.

Specifically, the title was "Beyond the Fringe: Why Majorities of Voters Believe Conspiracies About Power in Institutions."

We'll get into the results of the survey in just a minute, but more broadly, conspiracy theories, what in your mind landed as a conspiracy theory in the context of this survey?

- Well, thank you for asking that.

It's, at Change Research, we do hundreds of polls each year for candidates, causes, and progressive groups, people trying to influence legislation and win elections.

And part of what we do is regularly put out different research products, really go in-depth on an issue, to help people better understand where public opinion is now and where it can go.

And we thought about this, during the summer, during the height of the Jeffrey Epstein attention in the news media, I went back and read Richard Hofstadter's essay from the 1950's, "The Paranoid Style in the American Mind."

And just to sort of put in context, all the conspiracy theories that were being talked about at the time as they related to Jeffrey Epstein and how much more, what is the cause of that, and what do people believe and don't believe, and what types of groups we can put voters into.

So we interviewed 1,590 American voters all throughout the country from August 20 to 26 and asked them a whole variety of questions of things they believed, things that they don't believe, to try to get a better understanding of sorta where we are.

And part of the thing is, when you go back and read Hofstadter's essay, he defines paranoid and conspiratorial thinking as an apocalyptic sense of struggle, a conspiratorial worldview, an exaggerated perception of threat, a personalization of conflict, a style of overinterpretation, defensive aggressiveness in historical recurrence.

And you can see a lot of those patterns in the way that elected officials are talking today.

And wanted to sort of, went back and looked at what Joe McCarthy was saying in the 1950s about a great conspiracy on scales so immense, and earlier 19th century conspiracies about gold miners and gamblers and using every device of treachery to deal a blow to the prosperity of the people.

It really got into like the patterns of history and the patterns of how people are viewing current events is not all that different now than what it's been in the past.

And that was what we really wanted to get into.

- And so let's talk about one of the specific conspiracy theories that you tested that enjoys widespread appeal.

In your survey, "75% of American voters believe," and I'm quoting here, "Jeffrey Epstein was murdered to protect powerful people."

What does that specific response tell you about the mind of the American voter?

- The first thing it tells me is that voters just don't trust anything right now.

They don't trust the media.

They don't trust institutions.

We went back and looked at some historical Gallup data, and in the '90s and early 2000s, like about 60, about 2/3 of the public trusted the government, the federal government's handling of domestic affairs.

It's at 37% today.

- Wow.

- And any measure of like when you look at trust of news media, trust of government, it's all at a all-time low.

And we had a time period where people that are now in control of government were fomenting conspiracy theories about Jeffrey Epstein, that he was killed, he was killed in prison, he was covering up for powerful people.

And it was something that was believed on the right, and then when the Department of Justice put out their press release saying that, "No, there's nothing to see here, move on," over Memorial Day weekend, the perception of the government is hiding something achieved sort of a broad agreement across the political landscape.

And that's a big reason for it.

And just all of the holes in the story about how he killed himself and what the government is hiding is something that resonates across the political spectrum in ways that other conspiracy theories just don't.

- So Stephen, you mentioned media, and your research also found that, "74% of Americans believe," quote, "Mainstream media takes orders from powerful elites about what stories to cover," close quote.

When you hear the term powerful elites, there seems to be a whiff of old anti-Semitic tropes.

What does your data show us about powerful elites and what people are believing historically and particularly now?

- That's a very good question.

We didn't probe too deeply for this survey of what powerful elites, what it's defined at.

But we've seen in other surveys what people distrust the most right now, it's high-level government officials, corporate leaders, very wealthy billionaires.

I think if you go and look at favorabilities of Elon Musk and a lot of very specific, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, they're very, very low.

And you combine that with distrust of the news media, which has been widespread and growing for a long period of time, that sort of people think and process in stories, and what they are seeing and what they're believing is that the media and what they see is not to be trusted because it's been bought out by very powerful people who hold political opinions and political views that are different from themselves.

And at a time period when you look at some of the other questions we've been asking in other surveys, between 2/3 and 3/4 of the American people believe that their current level of income is falling behind the cost of living.

And the belief that like they're falling behind while other people are getting ahead, and that is breeding resentment.

So when you bring in tropes and bring in statements like powerful elites, corporate control, corporate leaders, people are gonna respond very negatively about it because they don't believe they have the control of their own life and future.

And they're looking for stories and people to blame for it.

- Oh.

So there seems to be an irony here.

You mentioned some of the big social media companies and distrust of people like Zuckerberg and other people.

And yet, a lot of people see what is fed through their Facebook feed or other social media and believe it without challenging it.

Is that an irony?

Is it a contradiction?

Can you maybe unpack that a little bit?

- It is when you, there's two different ways we do surveying.

One is that we go out and we talk to, like we did here, like 1,600 people, ask them a bunch of questions, count up the percentages, and then make statements from that.

The other thing we do is we do a lot of in-depth interviews, one-on-one with people.

And much like this, get on Zoom, just talk to people and ask them questions.

And it's one of the things that we've been examining this year is how people process information and believe that, like how do they determine what's true and what's not true.

And when you talk to someone and walk them through this, they have a very clear process, which is, one, "I don't believe anything that I see, whether it's a story on the news or something that I see on social media, unless I go and verify it.

And then I go and look at a whole variety of sources, and then sort of determine from that what I think is true and what I think is not true."

And very sort of meticulous about the process they go through.

Whether they do that or not, I am skeptical of that, but I think the key part of it is they don't believe what they see and they hear.

And then they try to find things in pieces to confirm sort of what they priorly believed.

And most importantly, they believe that others just take whatever they get and whatever they see and accept that as true.

But they're very sort of rigorous in how they believe what their process is, and that sort of, to me, that explains the disconnect of just what they believe and what they perceive to be true is part of the process of how they think they go through and verifying it and looking at other sources.

- But you know, there's another sort of disconnect here, and I wanna press you on this a little bit.

So.

- Yeah.

- Some of these numbers absolutely stun me, that they were that high.

"82% of Americans believe the CIA has been involved in the assassination of foreign leaders."

But, "60% believe that the CIA has been involved in the assassination of American political leaders."

And if we have that level of distrust in major institutions, should we be alarmed by the height of those numbers or the fact that people aren't in the streets protesting about this lawlessness that is apparently rampant across American government?

- Another excellent question.

And part of it's like, you go back and look at like one of the most famous scenes in recent American movies is Jack Nicholson saying at the end of "A Few Good Men," "You can't handle the truth."

(Jim laughing) - "I know the truth."

- Yeah.

- "You can't handle it."

And too much of what government has done is they make, people make decisions to hide things or do things to sort of shield the American people.

And I believe we've become accustomed to it and we've become sort of inured to it.

But people believe this because the government, the CIA, particularly institutions of the government like the CIA, like the Department of Justice, probably redact too much information and are not fully transparent in what they are releasing.

And when you give that sort of gap of, "We're not gonna release everything or we have to hold this back and basically protect ourselves," is creates this damage that allows these conspiracy theories to grow.

Recently a couple of weeks ago, there was a news story out about a CIA analyst who was assigned to tracking Lee Harvey Oswald before the Kennedy assassination.

And the sort of identity and awareness of this was just found out about now.

I think the guy's been dead for almost 30 years, trying remembering from the story.

But that was a deliberate decision by Allen Dulles and the Warren Commission to hold back on all the things that were happening before the assassination, which they believe was sort of in their best interest and convinced themselves that it was in the public's best interest.

But that sort of lack of transparency is what allows this to grow.

And I think when we're thinking about the future and thinking about like, what type of government do we wanna have, particularly as we get out of this era that we're in right now, it's a greater emphasis on more transparency and more sort of disclosing why decisions are made the way that they are.

Because rebuilding trust, like these low levels of trust in the federal government are not sustainable in the long term.

We're gonna have what you described, Jim, which is at some point a breaking point of being in the street or just hopelessly cynical.

And it's gonna be important for future leaders within government to acknowledge mistakes that have been made in the past and create structures that allow for greater transparency so we can ultimately get those trust in government numbers back to where they were 30, 40, 50 years ago.

- So your polling showed that, "56% believe the January 6 capitol riot was instigated by government agents."

How does that break down across party lines?

- That is largely Republicans who believe that.

Many of the things, there was a lot of commonalities between sort of the group we determined sort of the deep conspiracy believers, which were primarily right wing Republicans, 77% were Republicans, and sort of selective skeptics, which were about 77% Democrats.

And there was lots of overlap in sort of distrust of government, distrust of media, but high degree of trust for scientists and among the sort of selective, left-leaning conspiracy group.

And belief in, sort of cross-belief in things like Jeffrey Epstein was murdered and that the CIA assassinated people, but the more the conspiracy was directly coded as relating to Trump and relating to things that exist today, the greater the divide.

So it's like the people that believe that January 6 was by government agents are largely people that support Donald Trump and also believe that the 2020 election was stolen.

But the more sort of the conspiracy is coded very much in Trump, the divides are enormous.

But when it was things in the past or sort of uniquely Jeffrey Epstein, there's broad agreement sort of the left and the right by people that believe most in conspiracies.

- But 56% is larger than the number of Republicans in your polling sample.

- Yeah, there are some other people, particularly in the middle and independents, who also are more likely to believe that something went on on January 6 that they haven't been told yet.

- But does that- - It's another one of these things where government, where sort of lack of transparency or sort of the investigation very partisan-coded, there's sort of the more detached people are also likely to believe stories that are not the ones that are being told by the people who are in charge at the time of the investigation.

- There are a few other, I think in my mind, these are related.

You found that, "55% of respondents believe COVID-19 was deliberately created in a laboratory.

52% believe the deep state actively works to undermine elected officials.

And 51% believe that big tech companies," quote, "Secretly coordinate to silence conservative voices."

I guess what I wanna ask is, what does this tell us about media literacy more broadly or information literacy more broadly in the American public?

- It's not great.

(participants laughing) I think that's and easy way to say it.

I think the other part of it is, is that we are in a different era of media than we were five, 10, 15, 20 years ago in terms of the fragmented audience, the rise of, as we moved away from the platforms being newspapers, radio, and television to the internet and to social media and then different social media channels that feed content based on algorithmic assumptions of what people respond to the most, when we have a media that's like feeding things based on what the emotional response is and the likelihood to click, those stories are gonna get more and more prevalent.

And that there's no real sort of media gatekeeper or no real source of truth, and people perceive their inability to understand what is true and what's not true is gonna make it harder to sort of come across like a common agreement about an event that we might all see on television at the time, but the story behind it is going to become more and more opaque.

And it's media literacy, but I think it's, honestly, like if you were to teach high school and junior high school medial literacy, well, I mean, you both work with young people and college students, sort of what you would teach in media literacy five years ago would not be applicable to the sort of environment that is today.

And I think part of it is like more creative thinking, particularly among the people who want to be teaching that literacy, on what do we think the sort of media environment, the platforms, the sources, and the algorithms and incentives are going to be, particularly as these choices are gonna be driven more and more by AI.

Like what are the things that people are gonna need to learn to navigate what the world is gonna be like in five to 10 years?

As opposed to what it is now and certainly what it was in the past.

- So let's get into a few more of the numbers here.

"42% of Americans believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen through system fraud.

41% think there was some kind of government foreknowledge or involvement in 9/11.

36% believe that," quote, "Most election results are hacked and tampered with, and we have no idea who voters really prefer," close quote.

And the same percentage, "36% believe the Trump assassination attempt," rather, "was faked."

So the question is, how can we function as a democracy with such sizable minorities holding these kinds of views about our government?

- That's the question of our time right now.

That is, it's the way that leaders are going to have to act in the future is going to have to be different than what it was in the past.

And it's very interesting to me of, particularly about 9/11, is right now, you have Tucker Carlson with a fairly large audience doing a prominent series with someone who is saying that the 9/11 story is a conspiracy, that the government knew about it.

I don't know all the details of it, but basically, the story that the Bush administration was telling at the time was a lie and presenting an alternative history.

That does get widespread audience.

And we did a poll a few years ago among Republicans, and I was in my early 30s during 9/11, and if you said things like that George Bush was duped into the war in Iraq, you would've just been, you wouldn't have been treated as a serious person.

Now you sort of look at Republicans and a majority of them believe that, basically, George W. Bush was duped into Iraq by the deep state.

That's becoming a much more common belief.

So it's even fixed views of history can be changed, and they can be changed by prominent leaders using their broad platform to provide, no other way to put it, to provide the voices of cranks.

And if it becomes widespread enough without challenge, then these beliefs change over time.

The way that people view historical events can be very different 25 years later than what they were at the time.

And it's sort of striking to me when we look at 9/11 from that point of view.

But it is going to be harder to do that, but part of what a successful leader does is be able to rally the public behind sort of their vision of the future, but also like how they believe the government is operating and should operate.

And the transparency and clearness is going to be a highly valued commodity, or otherwise, people are just not gonna consider you for a leader.

- You know, 29% of Americans believe that, quote, "The government is seeding clouds with chemicals to control the weather or population."

I went and did a little research to get ready for this episode and found that in 2025 alone, legislators in at least eight states had introduced legislation to ban what are called chemtrails.

- Yes.

- What happens to a democracy when we begin legislating based on conspiracy theories?

- It is problematic and it starts with, particularly those eight states, the level of, I can probably guess which eight states that they are, but it's a larger problem.

The problem in democracy is, and there's many different things, but that one is in particular, most state legislative races are not competitive.

The people that get elected, particularly in one-party districts and one-party states, are, there are a lot of crackpots who get elected.

And when we have particularly different media outlets that feed stories about like seeding clouds with chemtrails, I think this started on talk radio 20, 25 years ago, and it proliferates online, you're going to elect very deep conspiracy believers to state legislatures.

And people are going to be afraid of them enough where it's just like, "Well, we can pass this law.

It's really gonna have no effect."

But yet, the problems are multi-layered in terms of, like it's not just President Trump saying conspiracy theories or Congress not acting.

We have state legislatures that are, that don't really sort of operate from what a lotta people would assume would be sort of the sober responsibility of representative republican government that we're sort of taught when we're in elementary school.

- Stephen, we've got about 90 seconds left here.

- Okay.

- And I'm wondering, if you can draw a dividing line.

You've got a bunch of conspiracy theories that are held by the majority of the American people.

Then you've got others, including flat Earth and UFOs and things like that, that are not held by a majority of the American public.

Is there something that creates that division, something that bumps something up into the majority-held view?

- It does if it's something that is broadly related to the federal government and the federal government not providing complete information about something.

And something where there is incentives and media incentives and people who will get airtime by providing alternative views and a few selective facts that challenge that.

The case of UFOs and other things are harder, harder for people to believe, particularly ones that have been out there and they're sort of in movies and popular culture.

But when it gets very specific into a story of the federal government is not telling you the truth about something, and that something is not coded very strongly to one party or another, people are going to believe lots of different things.

- Stephen Clermont, your work is absolutely fascinating.

Thank you for sharing some of it and the work that you do at Change Research with us.

But that is all the time we have this week.

If you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on social media or visit salve.edu/pellcenter, where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes, asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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