Conspiracies Have Short Lifetimes

As most readers of this blog already know,  I have long denounced the conspiracy theory that there is some evil “deep state” in control of our government and others around the world.  This derives largely from Qanon and similar or related sites on the internet,  all very popular with right-wing and far-right readers.  While some aspects and pieces of this movement date earlier,  this became a fearless leader cult around Donald Trump during 2015,  as he began his run for the Presidency in the 2016 election. 

Key to this is supposedly secret information about forces led by Trump to depose this “deep state”.  This is to take place as a “storm” during which “deep state” people will be rounded up,  imprisoned,  perhaps tried or perhaps not,  but definitely executed.  Invariably,  the persons identified as targets of this “storm” are Hollywood elites,  Democrats all over,  and any Republicans who are not Trump cultists (referred to as RINO’s).  Also invariably,  cultists refer especially to Democrats as being evil enemies of the state,  worthy only of being killed,  which has inspired considerable “lone wolf” violence of late.  

To accomplish this requires overthrowing our democracy and replacing it with a Trump-led dictatorship.  That’s the secret!  Which is exactly why so many Trump cultists have become publicly known to be “authoritarians” (meaning advocates of a dictatorship in America).  It is why Trump himself has recently begun saying “dictatorship on only day one” if re-elected.  The only part of that which is a lie,  is the word “only”.  And given his track record over the decades for egregious lying,  that is no surprise at all!

Secrets are hard to keep,  and with conspiracies to keep them secret,  there are invariably some numbers of people who know about them.  It has always been the pattern in the past,  that eventually somebody talks and spills the secret.   Thus there is some sort of finite “lifetime” that such information,  and the conspiracy to keep it secret,  both have.

I ran across a news item on the PBS NewsHour web site that describes the modeling of such conspiracy lifetimes.  This was “How Many People Does It Take to Keep a Conspiracy Alive?”,  which I retrieved from their web site 7 December 2023.  It was apparently published there 15 February 2016,  but I missed it back then.  The article reports the published academic work of one David Robert Grimes at Oxford University,  who found an equation modeling this effect as lifetime-to-revelation versus number-of-people-involved.  He reportedly published this equation in the Journal PLOS ONE.

I did not track down his published article.  The PBS NewsHour article gave enough numerical data for me to just reverse-engineer an approximation to what Grimes apparently found and published.  I simply keyed the quoted data into a spreadsheet,  plotted and re-plotted the data multiple ways,  and attempted some curve-fit equations.  One of those worked rather well,  and is probably fairly close to the Grimes result.  I even found one “bad data point” item quoted in the PBS news article.  My work is depicted by the plots in Figure 1.  It is the log-log plot options that produced fittable curves.

Figure 1 – Reverse-Engineering a Correlation Equation From Quoted Data (Excluding “Bad Data Point”)

The modeling equation that worked best,  as indicated by the higher Pearson’s r-squared parameter,  is in the upper right plot of the figure.  It models the data quite well.  It is:

               Y = 4.4378 [log₁₀(no. of ppl)]^-1.235

               Life, yrs = 10^Y

Now,  apply this to the Trump-cult (Qanon) conspiracy,  whose “secret” is that they want a Trump-led dictatorship in the US,  and also that they want to kill all their opposition!  This formed about 8 years ago in 2015 during the campaign leading to the 2016 election.  Solving iteratively the equation-in-reverse for a 8-year life,  then no more than about 4262 persons could know about the secret,  and still have it remain hidden the 8 years since then.  That’s clearly not the case,  as there are millions of Trump supporters who voted for him in both 2016 and 2020.  At least some of them are cult believers.

Alternatively,  in those elections,  there were 80-something millions of Trump voters.  I picked 82 million as an estimate,  just to be the right magnitude only.  Assuming all of them are part of the Trump-cult conspiracy,  the equation says the expected lifetime before the secret gets revealed would be only about 2.2 years.  The assumption I made is not correct,  but using it helps bound the problem between these two results:  2.2 vs 8 years after the 2015 campaign.  The “right” answer must lie between these points.

In actuality,  the revelation that Trump and his advisors were integrally associated with the Qanon theory came out during his Presidential administration January 2017-January 2021.  Trump’s then-adviser retired General Flynn publicly advocated for Trump to replace our democracy with a dictatorship led by Trump,  so that the “deep state” could be “overthrown” and eliminated!  This really means all their opposition being rounded up and killed,  exactly like what happened when Adolf Hitler’s Nazis took over Germany.  This revelation happened about 4 years ago,  exactly between the bounds I just defined!

Using the equation iteratively-in-reverse again,  on the 4 years since the 2015 campaign to sometime in 2019,  it estimates the number of really hard-core,  extremist Trump-cult believers to be about 109,700.  While not millions,  that’s large enough to be very alarming,  as the pool from which right-wing extremist violence can most likely be expected to come.  And we have already seen it.

And,  we already have several Representatives and a few Senators who so very clearly come from this cult.  So,  why is our Congressional dysfunction a surprise?  It’s part of their plan!  Chaos instead of governing helps to “justify” their radical change to a dictatorship under Trump.

Subtracting that roughly 110,000 true-believer cultists from about 82 million evident Trump voters,  that says something like 81.9 million voters have been deceived by this cult,  into voting for a would-be dictator over the US,  who has already attempted an insurrection and takeover on 6 January 2021. 

And THAT ought to scare the ever-loving shit out of almost anybody!

Please wake up out there!