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The Panama Papers have revealed a network of banks, law firms, and powerful individuals who conspire to hide their wealth and connections. You might think that conspiracy theories would celebrate the investigation.
You'd be wrong.
Jennings Brown, staff writer for Vocativ, noticed this week that the subreddit r/Conspiracy is buzzing with news about the Panama Papers -- but the connection is counter-intuitive. He talks to Bob about why conspiracy theorists believe the Panama Papers is part of a media plot to destroy enemies of the West, and what we learn from considering these fringe theories.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I’m Bob Garfield. The Panama Papers have offered a rare glimpse inside the intricate network of shell companies, aliases and proxies used by politicians, tycoons, banks and law firms to obscure wealth from prying eyes or, put another way, documentary evidence of actual conspiracies of “global elites.” For the believers of the sinister power of the 1 percent, this is yeti, this is Area 51, this is the Loch Ness monster! And it's real. Ah-ha, that's just what they want you to think!
But if you’re to believe the conspiracy theories floated since the Panama Papers dropped, the whole affair is itself a tool of the vast “New World Order” conspiracy, through which an unseen hand unleashes the corporate media to distract us all from the true machinations, [CHUCKLES] you fool.
Jennings Brown reports on conspiracy theories for Vocativ, a news site that investigates the deep web. He wrote this week about the main themes guiding the conspiracy narrative around the Panama Papers.
JENNINGS BROWN: Most of these theories revolve around the fact that this comes from a unusually named organization, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, and their webpage list all their funders which includes the Ford Foundation, Carnegie Endowment, Rockefeller Family Fund and the Open Society Foundations, founded by George Soros, who was a, you know, major progressive political donor to conspiracy theorists and who often tie a lot of these organizations to the Illuminati and Bohemian Grove and a lot of other secret societies. I mean, this is –
BOB GARFIELD: Let me stop you there, Jennings. I want to play you a piece of tape, an example of what you are describing.
JENNINGS BROWN: Mm-hmm.
BOB GARFIELD: This is a guy named James Corbett, described as a, quote, “popular conspiracy theory-touting fringe journalist.” And he, himself, is looking at the ICIJ's website.
[CLIP]:
JAMES CORBETT: Oh, Open Society Foundations, mmm, where have I heard of that before? Oh, the Ford Foundation. It just so happens that their targets, that the people that they’ve found the, the goods are on are either directly in the crosshairs of the State Department or people that are really just collateral damage or people that they might just want to hold something over, the king of Saudi Arabia, for instance.
[END CLIP]
BOB GARFIELD: The funders that he is describing, it’s not Henry Ford's ghost who is running the Ford Foundation. [LAUGHS] It is a foundation that has underwritten some of the most important do-gooder projects for many decades.
JENNINGS BROWN: Right. And this is something I experienced when I was out working at Popular Mechanics under Hearst Media. We did a book that investigated all of the 9/11 conspiracy theorists and debunked every one of them, but for years later anytime any editor appeared on a radio show, these people would call in and think that because we had ties to William Randolph Hearst, who no doubt was in some sort of secret society, we must have been playing into this massive government cover-up behind 9/11. They look for every single tiny angle, especially these ties to some of the early millionaires who built America. It’s just fascinating that they think that there's still a strong connection to what those people did.
BOB GARFIELD: There’s always a trump card to be played that explains everything. This is John McAfee, the Internet security tycoon. He’s on the syndicated radio show Infowars with conspiracy monger Alex Jones.
[CLIP]:
JOHN McAFEE: We do, in fact, know that the German media has been, in fact, highly infiltrated by the CIA, and I’m sure that every single reporter on the International Commission(sic) Of Investigative Journalists, [LAUGHS] I can guarantee every single one of those are CIA.
[END CLIP]
BOB GARFIELD: We should probably observe that there's pretty solid non-conspiratorial reasons why a lot of US names haven’t shown up, yet. One is that the keyword is “yet.” There is more to follow. A second is that US companies do not have to go to Panama to set up shell firms because they can do it right here in Delaware. But no, no, there are better ones that the smart people have. Just give me an idea of what kind of explanations are being floated for why this has all taken place?
JENNINGS BROWN: So a lot of these theories kind of revolve around the idea that maybe that there are Americans that are on the list that are being protected but they’re going to use this as, as blackmail and that the US Secret Service is going to go after them. That's also a common thread, that the CIA, the US Secret Service are actually at the will of this larger New World Order government that's rising up.
It’s fascinating, just the overall obsession with George Soros. His name is mentioned almost more than Putin or Jackie Chan [LAUGHS] or any of the people who've been involved in this leak. And libertarianism is such a strong theme in this channel, they don't seem to give the Koch brothers as much heat.
BOB GARFIELD: So in the world nothing is coincidental, and if you're not stupid it's obvious to you.
JENNINGS BROWN: If you’re not one of the sheeple.
[BOB LAUGHS]
Each one of these major events or mass shootings or bombings are what they call “false flags,” staged events that are falling into this master plan that will help the New World Order rise up. And I found one Redditer who was saying, quote, “What blows my mind is that all these things are happening at once, the Vaxxed movie, elections, guys in the desert caught shooting and chanting, Panama Papers, quote, "terrorist attacks", shootings, etc. I feel as though we’re nearing the end of the story here, guys.”
BOB GARFIELD: It reminds me of end times prophecies, except secularized but also fetishized.
JENNINGS BROWN: And, of course, none of this is new. I mean, you’ve had conspiracy theorists since the beginning of human civilization. But certainly the Internet is a big part of this, I mean, the fact that hundreds of thousands of these skeptics and freethinkers can come together and build this echo chamber of crazy theories with an endless amount of fake news stories, the fact that Alex Jones used to be far more on the fringe than he is now. I mean, now he's sitting down and interviewing the Republican frontrunner. Donald Trump is praising him for his good work. These voices are certainly becoming louder and taken more seriously and, in some way they’re vindicated. I mean, before Snowden came around a lot of those things, we would have thought, were just the crazy chants of conspiracy theorists.
But what’s amazing is that when a consortium of investigative journalists comes together and reveals this amazing story, that's not enough. There must be something more, and they don't want the journalists to do their due diligence and proper journalism.
BOB GARFIELD: Should we even play this conversation on our show? Will that not just be a bellows of oxygen on the wingnuts’ blaze?
JENNINGS BROWN: That’s something I struggle with, you know, when I'm covering a lot of these stories. And also, you know, I don't want to patronize these people, and I try not to paint conspiracy theorists as tinfoil hat-wearing crazies. Skepticism is great. Journalists are skeptics. We look for the deeper truths. And I check the subreddit of “Conspiracy” daily because partially it’s just a fun hobby to see what conspiracy theories are bubbling up, partially it's a great tool for journalism. I mean, you have a lot of crowd-sourced journalism and if you're willing to mull through a lot of the junk, sometimes you find little kernels of truth.
BOB GARFIELD: Maybe, but there's just such an absence of intellectual honesty, to list the names of these foundations as some sort of obvious smoking gun, how the initiated understand immediately what it means and everybody else are just sheeple. What good comes of that? That’s not skepticism, that's fabulism.
JENNINGS BROWN: Certainly. I think it's good that journalists reach out to them and that there's more of a back-and-forth communication in that, you know, we’re on your side [LAUGHS] and we want to expose corruption. And so, I think that it's good to cover some of these theories that are popping up and to bridge the gap between conspiracy theorists and journalism because the more that you do that, the, the more that they might be open to kind of realizing that we’re on the same team. And maybe it's a lost cause. Maybe I'm doing this for no reason, out of just sheer fascination.
BOB GARFIELD: Or –
JENNINGS BROWN: Or?
BOB GARFIELD: - obviously, just a foot soldier in the overall “master plan.”
JENNINGS BROWN: You’re onto me.
BOB GARFIELD: Oh, and when you speak to George, uh, tell him I haven't gotten my paycheck this month.
JENNINGS BROWN: [LAUGHS] Certainly.
BOB GARFIELD: Jennings, thanks very much.
JENNINGS BROWN: Thanks for having me, Bob.
BOB GARFIELD: Jennings Brown reports on conspiracy theories for Vocativ, a site that investigates the deep web.