A friend recently tried to convince me that President Trump orchestrated his own assassination attempt. I wasn’t having it. Not because I was certain he was wrong. It’s hard to be certain of anything these days (or any day). But come on. Conspiracy theories? They’re fun and all, but that way lies madness. And, increasingly, destruction.
Who is the modern-day conspiracy theorist? What motivates him? In my experience, it tends to be a “him,” but not always. (I once camped on remote land owned by a weather-beaten woman who was certain the rock formations beneath our feet were simulated by alien technologists.) Politically, it’s muddier. I know just as many cuckoo-for-conspiracies Democrats (see above) as Republicans, and sometimes I’m not sure there’s much of a difference. The main character in this week’s Big Story? His conspiracy theories don’t change, but his politics, such as they are, kind of do.
His name is Sean Aaron Smith, and he’s one of the anti-5G-ers—you know, the people who think cell towers are reading our minds and making us sick. Or something. He’s not just any tech conspiracist. Between 2021 and 2022, Smith set fire to 22 such towers, making him the most prolific anti-5G arsonist in the world. He’s in prison now, and our writer, Brendan I. Koerner, spent the past year talking to him.
Brendan’s story—“One Vigilante, 22 Cell Tower Fires, and a World of Conspiracies”—is an attempt to understand Smith’s psychology, the hows and whys of political violence. As I see it, the explanation, in the end, might be rather simple. More and more people feel, or are being made to feel, stupid and sidelined by society. To what, then, should they turn? One’s susceptibility to conspiratorial thinking is directly proportional to one’s need to be taken seriously.
