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The Political Scene | The New Yorker
Who Believes in the Moon Landing?
00:16:20
Who Believes in the Moon Landing?
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:16]
B
This is the Politics and More podcast. I'm David Remnick. On a July night in 1969, I was in summer camp with a whole bunch of kids and we watched as a counselor dragged the a big black and white television outside. And amidst the mosquitoes and all the rest, we sat on the ground and watched two astronauts walk on the moon. Me and about 600 million other people watched two men walking on the surface of the moon. It was the most incredible thing. But as remarkable as that event was, maybe just as amazing as how many people refuse to believe it to this day. People say that the space voyage was faked, an elaborate hoax engineered by NASA for some sort of nefarious purpose. And in some accounts, the fake footage was directed by none other than Stanley Kubrick. Generally, when I'm trying to understand something that outlandish and something that's all over the Internet, I call on Andrew Marantz. He's a staff writer who reports for us on politics, extremism and social media. So some sources say that 20% of Americans, 20% believe the moon landing never happened. This is something that goes way back. It obviously predates social media. Where does it come from? What do we know?
- [02:35]
C
So I think there were skeptics from the moment that the footage was being beamed back to Earth, right? There were people watching that broadcast and saying, nah, I don't buy it. Doesn't seem real. And actually there's this really interesting passage in Bill Clinton's autobiography, My Life, that actually a lot of the moon hoax conspiracy theorists will point to where he talks about, I think he was back in Arkansas working construction for the summer or something, and he talks to this kind of curmudgeonly older carpenter guy and he says, hey, what do you think? You know, we just landed on the moon. This is, you know, summer of 1969. And the carpenter goes, do you really think that happened? And young Bill Clinton says, yeah, I'm pretty sure it happened. And the carpenter says, ah, I don't know. Those television fellers could do whatever they want to do. They can make things seem real that aren't real. And then Bill Clinton, in this kind of ironic touch, says, you know, I thought he was a crank back then, but after eight years in Washington, I think he might have been onto something. So the conspiracists, the conspiracists will point to that as evidence that, you know, a president is confessing to this great hoax that he's sort of been clued into since he was in the White House. My read of that is these people, these skeptics have always existed, but, but all they could really do in 1969 was talk to the guy next to them on the job. They couldn't go out on Facebook and blast their theories to the world.
- [03:57]
B
My understanding is that these rumors percolate for about six or seven years. And then in 1976 there comes along a self published book by someone named Bill Kaysing called We Never Went to the America's $30 billion swindle. Who is Bill Kaysing and what was the theory that he was putting forward?
- [04:19]
C
So he was a guy who worked for a rocket manufacturing company many years before he puts out this book and he claims that he saw these classified NASA documents that proved that this never happened. His evidence, I don't think it will entirely surprise you to learn, is not rock solid. For instance, there's this iconic image of the flag, the American flag, being planted on the moon. If you think back to that image, you have a mental image of that. The flag is waving, right? Yeah, that seems like it should be impossible because there's no atmosphere on the moon. So what wind is it waving in? And there are dozens and dozens of things like this. There's a photo where, you know, it looks like the astronaut should be in shadow, but instead the astronaut is fully lit. People will say that's because it was on a soundstage. There's, I mean, literally dozens of these things. And there has been a kind of cottage industry of people knocking down these rumors one after another. NASA and other people, essentially. Since this book came out, what kind.
- [05:24]
B
Of exposure did he get?
- [05:26]
C
Yeah, so he didn't get much right away. He publishes this book in 1976. It's a self published book. It's sort of in this long tradition of people writing pamphlets that have wacky ideas in them that don't really have a huge impact on the culture. And it kind of just sits there and slowly percolates for a while, essentially, until 2001. Fox puts out this documentary called Conspiracy Theory. Did we land on the moon tonight? Liftoff.
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B
We have a liftoff.
- [06:00]
C
We investigate the most extraordinary event of the 20th century. They pose it as a question. They say, this is controversial material. We don't know what's true or not true. And their main source, their main talking head for this was Bill Casey. Could the government have orchestrated the deception of the century?
- [06:20]
B
NASA could have pulled off the greatest hopes of all time.
- [06:24]
C
You be the judge.
- [06:27]
B
So it's a little bit Trumpian. It's a little bit like, you know, a lot of people say, or I've heard that.
- [06:32]
C
Exactly. Many people are saying, yeah, right. Many people are saying. And like the Trumpian impulse, the impulse is to shock and titillate. I mean, Fox has been the most ratings conscious, the most clever about getting stuff out there since its inception. And even then, you know, this was a big moment for the hoax theory. But as big as that exposure was, it was still just a one time event. But then, you know, you move forward in time to the current decade when you have YouTube and all kinds of social networks, Facebook, you know, these things that kind of where you can get these feedback loops, these echo chambers, these rabbit holes. I don't know exactly how this kind of theory got started, but the theory develops that Stanley Kubrick, the director of the Shining, had also directed 2001 A Space Odyssey. 2001 A Space Odyssey came out a year before the moon landing and after the Shining comes out in 1980. There is a small but passionate cohort of people who believe that the Shining was Stanley Kubrick's secret confession to having been part of this secret government Conspiracy. And there are reams of material. And so I think a great example of the YouTube version of this stuff is this very homemade looking documentary called the Shining 2.0. Or sometimes it's called the Shining Code 2.0. And it's. It's basically this one guy who it seems like just sat down with a bit of editing software and made this extremely in depth examination, I guess you could say, exegesis.
- [08:07]
B
Jack Nicholson plays the lead character Jack Torrance in the Shining. Jack represents the director Stanley Kubrick and his experience with NASA in producing and directing the Apollo 11 moon mission.
- [08:20]
C
You're basically watching him freeze frame on the Shining, write words in text on the screen, and it's essentially this. For every bit of the Shining.
- [08:28]
B
The eagle sitting on the windowsill between the number 11 represents the Apollo 11 lunar module. The Eagle. Wow. So it's a real la la land.
- [08:39]
C
Yes. This is extreme. I mean, this makes Bill Kaysing look like a rocket scientist.
- [08:44]
B
Where is the moon landing conspiracy theory at today? Who still believes this and why?
- [08:51]
C
Look, it's impossible to put exact numbers on this, but there are a lot of people who believe things like this. And in fact, it's not just, you know, random cranks. There are people who believe this who have huge platforms. A good example is Joe Rogan, who has arguably the most popular podcast in the world. He's a comedian, he's interested in, you know, fighting, mixed martial arts fighting. He's not quite a denialist that we landed on the moon, but he's definitely hoax curious. And you can hear him on his show doing this again and again. You can, theoretically, you can jump higher. And if, if you believe in NASA, bro, there's some videos of guys jumping around on the moon. Yeah. The problem with the videos of people on the moon is that there are videos that look 100% fake. So you, you're still wavering on whether.
- [09:43]
B
We went to the moon?
- [09:43]
C
I'm more wa. No, I'm too dumb and uneducated to really know. But I am wavering more on the possibility that some of the footage was faked. He's obviously deeply intrigued, you could say. But he also has enough kind of distance and kind of self ironic posture to know that this is wacky stuff.
- [10:03]
B
It sounds like it's good for business.
- [10:05]
C
It's good for business. That could be it. Or it could be a combination of that and also that he wants to maintain his right to be skeptical. There is this kind of fundamental thing that we have as humans, as Americans, we particularly in the press you know, we like to be skeptical of claims. And, you know, frankly, some of the best art comedy, investigative journalism certainly comes out of that. Skepticism comes out of not believing the official narrative of something. So it's an impulse that I think is really helpful in a lot of cases. It's just a question of how far do you take it.
- [10:42]
B
So conspiracy theories are all over the place in many different political contexts, but right now, they're often associated with the alt right. You have QAnon, Pizzagate. Why is this kind of stuff so attractive to that particular political group?
- [10:58]
C
I think there are a lot of people who don't like the way things are going for them. A lot of people who really thought that they were gonna support Trump and Trump was gonna come in and drain the swamp, and it doesn't really seem like he's doing it. And so they need to come up with a theory, in many cases an extremely outlandish theory, to explain why what they wanted to happen is actually happening. It's just not visible on the surface. So QAnon is a perfect example of this. Right? You have a lot of people who the basics of it is Trump is actually cleaning out all the corruption and all the alleged pedophile rings and all these really deep, dark things. He just doesn't want us, the American public, to know about it yet. So he's doing it in secret. The Jeffrey Epstein arrest is a big part of this most recently. But this goes back way before that. Pizzagate was part of it, where there was this allegation that Hillary Clinton's campaign manager was running a secret sex trafficking ring. Basically, there are these dots that people will connect that to them. They've built up this kind of internally cohesive world where these are secret breadcrumbs that the Trump administration is dropping to them to let them know we are taking care of stuff behind the scenes. We will reveal it all to you, and everything will be okay, but we just have to take care of it first. Behind. Behind the scenes.
- [12:19]
B
Andrew, are there conspiracy theories on the left of politics as well? And what do those look like?
- [12:25]
C
Oh, definitely. You know, 9, 11 conspiracies generally are the domain of the left. And I should say, you know, all the allegations about Putin interfering with the 2016 election, it is, literally speaking, a conspiracy theory. It's one that has a lot of evidence behind it. But, you know, not all the evidence has panned out. Some of the things in the Steele dossier were borne out by evidence. Some of them were not. And there are definitely people on the left who took everything in that dossier as gospel and advisedly, and they were proven wrong. So the human mind can make up a conspiracy theory about anything it wants to.
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B
How much does it matter whether or not people believe that we went to the moon in 1969?
- [13:13]
C
I think it matters in the sense that, you know, we have to live in a shared reality. It's fine to have an academic exercise where you go, how do I know what's really true? And how do I know what the Shining is really about? And how do I know that your blue is my blue? I mean, I think that stuff is really all to the good. The question is, can we ever get down off of that academic perch and come down to some shared ground truth where we say, you know what? I think that the report that the CBO just put out is basically true, or if I think it's not true, I have reasons for that. And, you know, you can listen to my reasons and I can listen to your reasons. Like, if we can't do that, it's very hard to have a republic.
- [13:57]
B
Now, it seems to me that not only do we have a president who has no problem propagating racism from the White House as much the most in years since, say, Woodrow Wilson, but we also have a president of the United States who, even if he's not repeating conspiracy theories as absolute truth, he is gesturing toward his sympathy with them. Whether it has to do with UFOs, whether it has to with a sympathy with Alex Jones. How has that affected the whole politics that we think of as Trumpism?
- [14:35]
C
Yeah, it's a big part of it. He does overtly signal that he doesn't really believe that vaccines are good for you. There's the individual level of that, which is, you know, his supporters can sort of find comfort in his denial of facts that are inconvenient. Climate change being the biggest and most important one. But there's also the larger atmosphere that that creates, which Hannah Arendt had this famous phrase, you know, in a totalitarian regime, nothing is true and everything is possible. So by just attacking the very notion of facticity, the very notion that you even could ever know information about the world, you know, you're not only rebutting one particular claim, you're creating a set of conditions where you can say anything, and then as an authoritarian figure, you can use that to your advantage.
- [15:24]
B
So you've done a very good job of sketching out the history and the problem. How do we fix it all?
- [15:31]
C
I think you just pass a bill in Congress and it should take care of itself? No, I don't think it's that simple. I think, you know, I think about this stuff, you know, I think a lot about the kind of informational morass we're in and this moment where nobody knows what to think or what to say about anything. I think of it like a, you know, like the opiate crisis or like the climate crisis. It's a big, complex tangle of things. And like any of those issues, it's going to take a lot of different approaches to get out of it. So I think, you know, we. We have to figure out what to do about big tech, whether they need to be regulated, whether they need to be broken up, whether they need to just be, you know, better understood. And, you know, people need to find ways to interact with them in a more healthy way. Education is a big part of it. News literacy. You know, it sounds sort of on the nose, but I think it would help if people knew kind of how the news was put together. I also think that just kind of reducing inequality and reducing the conditions that make people feel alienated and afraid and frankly, angry at any institution that has any sway over their lives would indirectly, but I think very meaningfully combat this. But I think the key thing is we're really just at the beginning of dealing with the most outward symptoms of this. You know, we see someone come along who is breaking the rules of this or that social network. And, you know, we. We say that person should be banned, and then that person is either banned from the social network or not. That is the end stage. That's the symptom. We're not getting to the underlying causes yet, and we need to do that.
- [17:07]
B
Andrew Marantz, thank you so much.
- [17:09]
C
Thank you.
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B
Andrew Morantz is a staff writer at the New Yorker, and he's been finishing up his book called Online Extremists, Techno Utopians and the Hijacking of the American Conversation. It's out this fall. Right now, we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnick, and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening alongside politicians and thinkers like Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Steven Tim Waltz, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Charlamagne, the God, and so many more. That's all in the New Yorker Radio Hour. Wherever you listen to podcasts.
- [18:06]
C
From prx.