Jeff Chan, “Adam Ruins Everything (Season 2, Episode 12: Adam Ruins Conspiracy Theories)” (2017)
An enjoyable if not very substantial episode in this educational comedy series, “Adam Ruins Conspiracy Theories” manages to ruin just one major conspiracy theory – that the lunar landings made by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in 1969 were actually filmed in a Hollywood studio – and to explain how and why conspiracy theories arise and how they are not as harmless as many might believe. Adam (Adam Conover) is spending time with new gal pal Melinda and all seems to be well until he spots literature on the Apollo 11 moon landings being a hoax strewn over her desk. He desperately explains to Melinda that Armstrong and company did indeed land on the moon and that the studio technologies needed to fake a moon landing and take photographs of the landing were actually far beyond the budgets of Hollywood studios in 1969. Next up, he demonstrates how belief in conspiracy theories can harm people with the example of the 1980s mass panic over daycare centres being hot-beds of child sexual abuse and Satanic indoctrination of children. Finally Adam explains why people are so ready to believe in conspiracy theories: our brains are wired to see patterns and causality in randomness, and this leads among other things to cognitive biases and selective thinking that, with repetition and reinforcement, can solidify into false beliefs that are hard to dislodge.
To be honest, the first part of the episode, focusing on the moon landings, was very rushed and concentrated almost entirely on photographs of the astronauts which many people have claimed are proof that the landings were faked by Hollywood. This part of the episode perhaps deserves an hour-long episode to itself, to show that many hundreds, even thousands of people were involved in designing, constructing and launching the Apollo 11 craft that reached the moon. Neil Armstrong’s historic feat was the culmination of a space exploration program conceived and planned by politicians, bureaucrats and scientists in the US to send spacecraft and then astronauts into space and ultimately to land on and explore the moon and possibly Mars. This was done as much for ideological purposes (to compete with the Soviet Union to demonstrate the superiority of the capitalist system over Communism and socialism to the US public) as it was to advance human knowledge. The episode could have said something about (and paid tribute to) the people who made the moon landing possible.
The second part of the episode (about the Satanic indoctrination of preschool-age children by their teachers) verged on crassness as Adam and company teetered on a fine line of balance between slapstick and exploring a real issue that tragically ruined the careers of several teachers and which could have also traumatised the children in their care. Particularly disturbing was the revelation that police grilled young children with leading questions until they gave the interrogators the answers that the police wanted.
Finally the explanation as to how and why conspiracy theories arise and persist was just too pat for this viewer and fails to consider the cultural context in which they arise. The belief that the Apollo 11 moon landing never took place developed at a time when the US became embroiled in the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement calling for an end to racial discrimination against black and other non-white Americans was in full bloom. Americans were shocked at the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F Kennedy in 1968, a few years after Kennedy’s older brother, President John F Kennedy, was shot dead in 1963. Already conspiracy theories about the Kennedy brothers’ deaths abounded and details in those theories were sufficient and plausible enough – and details in the official account of JFK’s assassination were odd enough – that many people refused to believe that one man acting alone off his own bat could have killed JFK. The fact that by the late 1960s, people no longer trusted the US government to tell the truth about many things primed a population to accept conspiracy theories that were based on real events and facts, and which made plausible assumptions about the nature of the US government and its agencies, even if the theories themselves were wrong. And it must be said that some popular “conspiracy theories” about the activities of the CIA, such as Operation Mockingbird (to influence and shape news media), eventually turned out to be correct.
As Conover acknowledges, the panic over Satanic brainwashing of small children occurred at a time when women were entering the workforce in large numbers (whether out of choice of necessity), leading to an increasing demand for daycare centres to care for children. The mass hysteria that developed was in its own way a protest against the potential break-up of what was seen to be the “traditional” nuclear family (in which the husband is sole breadwinner and the wife stays at home to care for their children) as exemplified by wives and mothers going to work and having careers. This example shows how conspiracy theories function to reassure an anxious public, attempt to preserve stability and protest change imposed from above.
While the series “Adam Ruins Everything” is very entertaining and informative, its half-hour format is very restricting and doesn’t encourage a more detailed and nuanced investigation of the topics it covers.