I say this as a great admirer of @TheAtlantic and a lot of their new project on conspiracy theory, but it seems strange and even blinkered to put together such a project without really acknowledging how much recent history resembles conspiracy. (1/x) theatlantic.com/shadowland/
There is the mystery of Jeffrey Epstein's wealth and the mystery of his death; there is the federal acknowledgment of UFOs and UFO research; there is the Russian hacking of the 2016 election...
There is everything that has gone on at the DOJ since, including the elevator of an Attorney General who sees himself to be the president's personal enforcer, engaged (with the president) in an effort to rewrite the history of that hacking and its investigation...
...perhaps to jail the previous president and his current opponent, Joe Biden; there is the Panama Papers; there is Erik Prince acting somewhat as a shadow secretary of state; there are the enormous private gains made by the Trump family while in office; there is 1MDB.
Obviously, there is something horrifying and, yes, anti-enlightenment about the values animating QAnon or the theory that Bill Gates is engaged in a global vaccination or population control project, with the Gates Foundation merely as a cover.
But while people do sometimes acknowledge the Tuskegee experiment or MKUltra, say, in wrestling with the post-JFK boom in conspiracy theory culture, they rarely acknowledge that recent history is much fuller of conspiratorial and quasi-conspiratorial events than the 1960s...
...when you really had to be devoted to amateur detective work to learn about all the questionable things the American government was doing at the time.
Today, it's not just Alex Jones listeners who have questions about official narratives of public events, it's anyone who has been watching the news, and the president, over the last few years. In that environment, of course crank-ish paranoid thinking will grow. (x/x)
