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In the fall of 1967, during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson, whispers began to swirl in Washington that a shocking government report was about to come to light. Rumor had it that the Kennedy administration had convened a “Special Study Group” to investigate the threat to social and economic stability “if and when the conditions for a ‘permanent peace’ should arrive”; in other words, if the US military were to pull out of Vietnam and stop fighting wars altogether. The resulting Report from Iron Mountain—named for a military storage facility in New York’s Hudson Valley where the group’s final meeting had supposedly taken place—had not been meant to be public, but a member of the group had leaked it.
The Johnson administration scrambled to figure out if such a report existed, and ultimately concluded that the whole thing was a hoax. Then, however, Esquire published supposed excerpts from the report in its December issue, under the headline “On the Possibility and Desirability of Peace”; the subheading warned that the report’s contents were “so depressing that you may not be able to take it.” The article detailed how a group of experts had concluded that war was the “essential economic stabilizer of modern societies” and that a transition to peace would require an intensive scheme of government intervention. The group’s proposals included a system of eugenic artificial insemination, the introduction of new forms of slavery, and a program to convince the public that the world was facing extraterrestrial threats. Ultimately, the report concluded, these provisions would not be enough, and so war must continue until “we know exactly what it is we plan to put in its place.”
The Johnson administration quickly tried to reassure the world that the report had no basis in US policy. And it was indeed a hoax—one perpetrated by a group of left-wing, anti-war writers and thinkers to make a point about the government’s conduct during the Vietnam War. By then, however, the report had taken on a life of its own. The problem, according to CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite, was that it read to many people like a legitimate document—a testament to the growing contempt with which the American people viewed their government as the war raged on. For decades, the text would linger in the zeitgeist. It ultimately resurfaced as source material for the far-right militia movement of the nineties, lending the movement a kind of proof text from which its conspiratorial vocabulary has continued to evolve: about the manipulations of the ruling elite, the special interests of the “deep state,” the calculated way in which the federal government suppresses the truth. Even the authors’ emphatic insistence that the document was meant as satire has been taken as evidence of a government cover-up.
Now the author Phil Tinline is out with a book about the report, Ghosts of Iron Mountain, which was published last week. Tinline traces how the text was embraced by a movement for which belief lends legitimacy to evidence, rather than the other way around; the result is a chilling reflection on the origins of conspiracy theories that undergird political discourse in the era of Trump, and on the temptation to prioritize emotional resonance over truth. “There’s a difference between finding truths expressed in fiction, and thinking that fiction is factual evidence,” he writes. Recently, Tinline and I spoke about the blurring of fact and fiction, the media’s dual obligations to narrative and accuracy, and about what happens when reality itself is indistinguishable from satire. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
YRG: Before reading your book, I’d never heard of the Report from Iron Mountain, so I was struck by your reporting on the fact that the document and its various spin-offs are widely referenced in the world of right-wing conspiracy theories. How did you find out about the report? Why did you decide to make it the focus of your book?
PT: I was planning to write a book about this kind of generic conspiracy-theory story we all have in our heads, which has the sheeple and a cabal and the plucky maverick. I had a theory that each of those story elements come out of particular crises in the past that produced the idea of the gullible crowd—from the right-wing perspective—and then false consciousness, from a left-wing perspective, which are actually very similar ideas. Then I found these three different American political science books from the sixties that all happened to mention this thing called the Report from Iron Mountain. I looked it up and found a couple of paragraphs on Wikipedia that told the basic story—and I nearly fell off my chair. [At first] I thought it was going to be a chapter in my book, but it was like the magician pulling the handkerchief out of the sleeve; it just kept coming. I’ve always been interested in political fear, and conspiracy theories are a particular form of that; a particular way of thinking about power. [As a journalist] you’re always looking for a story that’s good enough in itself to be worth telling but also speaks to a bigger picture. This one story allowed me to go back to the themes I’d originally been intending to explore, but to do it with a much sharper focus.
What are the “ghosts” of Iron Mountain that you refer to in the title?
I use the word “ghosts” often [in my writing] because a lot of my work is about how the past informs, explains, contrasts with, or haunts the present. I’m not particularly interested in telling stories from history that are just entertaining anecdotes; I wanted to give a sense of the report’s enduring impact and what it reveals about America today. I think having a sense of the geological depth of the particular rocky maze that we’re in now is actually quite empowering because it gives the sense that there’s something perennial about this—that we’re not suddenly plunged into a world that was invented entirely by Facebook and Donald Trump. This is much more basic to the difficulties of living in an enormous society: How do you deal with the immensity of America as a country—geographically, population-wise, its power, its nuclear weapons? History is a way of trying to understand that other people have felt like that, too, and maybe feel a little less dwarfed.
In the book you write about the conditions in the late sixties that made the Report from Iron Mountain so believable. What were those conditions, and what parallels do you see in the political climate of the past several decades that has allowed for the proliferation of conspiracy theories based around similar themes?
I think this report landed so well precisely because it blurred the boundary between fact and fiction. Fundamentally, conspiracy theories are about trying to make sense of something immensely complicated. If you actually think about the way that a government department in America works, or a corporation—if you actually try to draw a diagram, person by person and role by role—it would be so complex and diffuse that you couldn’t compute it. So we have to have a way of making sense of that with something much simpler; that’s what makes these stories so irreducibly appealing. There’s no secret cabal behind everything, but even so, there is something—which is entirely tenable as a claim—about the combination of corporate influence and the “boss” class having a particular backstage influence. But that desire to have a simple answer is part of the problem. Michael Barkun, a great American scholar of conspiracy theories, talks about three primary principles of the conspiracy theory: that nothing is accidental, that everything is connected, and that nothing is as it seems. If you’re writing a novel or a screenplay and you manage to achieve those three things, you’ve done really, really well. But if you achieve that as a journalist, you’ve made a conspiracy theory.
You write about how the report’s authors, who intended it as a satire, eventually denounced its appropriation by right-wing groups—but ultimately they no longer had any control over how it was used. Did researching this book shift how you feel about the potential dangers of political satire?
I have a kind of pious instinct now about facts and fiction that I have to police. Of course, it’s thoroughly worthwhile to have dramatists engage with what’s happening in the political present—that’s part of their job. But I do see it in a more worried way now. Given that we’re in the situation we’re in—where narrative has been so weaponized, where it’s so swiftly able to be used against democracy—I think we’ve been reduced back to the fundamentals: if we do not have shared trust in truth, we cannot have a democracy. I think there’s a kind of permanent ambivalence that you have to maintain where you simultaneously recognize the potentially benign power of story to bring a democracy together [while] at the same time seeing that it can potentially declare that a particular powerless group in society—an out-group—should be blamed for everything. The more I think about this stuff, the more I think we’re living in a constant state of really ticklish ambiguities.
Much of this book is about the impact that the report had on the relationship between politics and truth that we see today. Do you think we would be where we are now if the authors had decided not to publish the report?
I’ve been trying to be really careful not to say [the report] is to blame for everything—it’s just more multivalent than that. I do think it’s fair to say that it provided, quote-unquote, “evidence” for a whole number of conspiracist ways of looking at the world. I do think it lends strength, entirely by accident, to some really quite problematic phenomena. But those kinds of mentalities are really hungry; they hunt around for food wherever they can find it, so maybe they would have found something else.
In the book you talk about the importance of what the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild calls “feels as if” stories, which show up in folktales, myths, and even on TikTok, and capture aspects of human experience that can’t be reduced to a set of facts. But you also write that there is a danger in confusing stories that feel like they could be real with those that actually happened. The news media is traditionally focused on the latter, but do you think we also have a responsibility to understand and communicate the appeal that the former hold for people?
I think, wherever possible, that it’s vital to see the hopes and the fears that make a person, and simultaneously apply rigorous journalistic standards of evidence. In Hochschild’s book Strangers in Their Own Land, she says [to her sources] All right, I want to hear your story. I want to understand how you see the world—tell me. And at the same time, she fact-checks it. I think that has to be the model: that you honor and respect people, their beliefs and their worldview, even if you don’t believe it. Up to a point—I’m not suggesting this about Nazism. If people on the mainstream center-left and center-right don’t do this, if journalists choose not to do it, then no one else is going to bother. My answer, really, is you just have to do both all the time.
Other notable stories:
- In a new report for Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Nick Turse finds that since October 7, 2023, the war in Gaza has killed more journalists than the US Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War (and related conflicts), the wars in Yugoslavia, and the US war in Afghanistan combined. “It is, quite simply, the worst ever conflict for reporters,” Turse writes. “Worldwide, threats to journalists in conflict zones are increasing. In 2023, a journalist or media worker was, on average, killed or murdered every four days. In 2024, it was once every three days. Most reporters harmed or killed, as is the case in Gaza, are local journalists. Not only do local reporters face great risk, standing alone in the face of extraordinary violence; this also impairs news coverage and, as a result, the worldwide information ecosystem.”
- A pair of updates to Monday’s newsletter, in which we wrote about Trumpian press threats including the gutting of the US Agency for Global Media and the threat to defund NPR and PBS, and how journalists are fighting back. At time of writing, USAGM had reportedly agreed to restore congressionally appropriated funds to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, one of the overseas broadcasters under its purview, amid a legal fight—but RFE/RL now says that it has yet to actually receive the money, and has had to furlough staff as a result. Meanwhile, Benjamin Mullin, of the New York Times, obtained a 2011 document from inside NPR predicting what would happen should its federal funding be cut; it would survive, but many of its member stations would have to close.
- Newsmax, the right-wing cable channel, went ahead with an initial public offering this week, and it has been wildly successful, with the stock nearly tripling in value yesterday, seemingly fueled by loyal viewers buying in. As CNN’s Brian Stelter reports, however, various observers are dismissing the surge as a “meme stock” that belies the true underlying value, and “investors have plenty of reason to exercise caution. The cable news landscape doesn’t exactly scream ‘growth.’ Newsmax’s financials are dreadful.” And it faces ongoing legal threats due to its coverage of the 2020 election, with a defamation case brought by Dominion Voting Systems set to go to trial this month.
- In other TV-news news, Jessica Testa, of the Times, spoke with former cable anchors, including Jim Acosta and Joy Reid, who have set up new ventures on Substack—and found success leaning into a more casual aesthetic. Elsewhere, NBC News is keeping Steve Kornacki, the politics and sports data maven, in its corporate divorce from MSNBC; he’ll no longer appear on the latter network, which is building out its own news division. And Gregg Jarrett, a legal analyst on Fox, is suing Simon & Schuster, claiming the publisher stole an idea for a book from him and gave it to the editor of Breitbart.
- And John Thornton—the cofounder of the Texas Tribune and the American Journalism Project, an organization that boosts nonprofit local news and recently landed a major investment from the Knight Foundation—has died. He was fifty-nine. Thornton “had this Texas swagger, seemed like an accomplished financier, and used swashbuckling metaphors,” Sarabeth Berman, the CEO of AJP, told CJR’s Sewell Chan (a former editor of the Tribune). “It was exceedingly clear that he was committed to the mission of revitalizing local news around the country and that it was essential to saving democracy.”
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