“The world is more chaos than we like to imagine,” Bryce Reh tells Anna Merlan in her book, Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power. “The faster we come to terms with that, the more fluidly you can deal with it.”
Reh is the general manager of Comet Ping Pong, a Washington, DC, pizza spot that in 2016 became the target of the wild, evidence-averse online conspiracy theory known as Pizzagate. That Reh could take such a healthily detached view of Pizzagate—the world is all swirling particles, and sometimes those particles take the form of a man shooting up your restaurant because strangers on the internet wrongly told him you aid and abet pedophiles—is admirable and probably good for his blood pressure.
But as Merlan reveals in her riveting, deeply-reported safari through the American fringe, chaos theory isn’t the best lens through which to view conspiracy theorists. No matter how far-fetched, discriminatory, or downright silly conspiracy theories like vaccine skepticism, Sandy Hook denialism, or “lizard people” might seem, there’s often a not-too-distant point in American history where truth really was stranger and crueler than fiction.
