“Any historically or politically literate citizen should at least entertain the possibility that


a) there’s a conspiracy going on somewhere and b) governments and corporations have a history of it”


cretly scheming to strip colonists of their liberty and rule over them with absolute authority. “It is curious and consequential that the justification for independence was a shaky conspiracy theory,” Uscinski and Parent state in their book. (Conspiracies can have positive outcomes.) The “birth through conspiracy” of the US highlights a defin-


ing feature of CTs: they wax and wane with political power. Many drivers of CTs have been suggested: economic hardship, social upheaval, big government. None works. For example, the Great Depression didn’t mark a high point of conspiracy theorizing. What does drive the ebb and flow of CTs is power and threat.


“The most important factor domestically is the party of the president,” says Uscinski. When Republicans are in power, con- spiracy talk turns to big business; when Democrats take over, it turns to Communists and world government.


The business of conspiracy Today, conspirationists seem busier than ever thanks to the in- ternet and social networks. That is a false impression, says Us- cinski; conspiracy theories are rather in decline. But Uscinski and Parent’s study is mostly based on newspaper documents. That’s not where conspiracy conversations happen anymore. They have moved to social networks and the web, says Jesse Walker, author of United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory. One thing is certain, “the Internet has changed the way con-


spiracy theories are generated and spread,” says Walker. Even more, the web has allowed CTs to become a thriving business, insists Fillion. Talking heads such as Alex Jones, Glenn Beck and Jesse Ventura have large followings. “With 1.3 billion views since 2008 on YouTube, adds Fillion, Alex Jones (website: Infowars) has nearly as many as CNN’s 1.9 billion views since 2005. And he sells advertising and products, such as ‘kits’ for people who want to live ‘off the grid.’ ” Another effect of the internet: where conspiracy narratives


were previously self-contained, they now cross-pollinate, says Walker. The Reptilians have invested the Illuminati, who now plot the New World Order through the Bilderberg meetings and the Trilateral Commission. CTs extend from the delusional to the plausible, from the ludi-


crous to the real, and that’s why many specialists now take them seriously. History is full of conspiracies and gives credence to conspiracy hypotheses. Conspiracies led to Caesar’s assassina-


42 | CPA MAGAZINE | SEPTEMBER 2017


tion in the Roman senate and to Hitler’s move to blow up the Reichstag in 1933 and later incinerate millions. Why should it be ludicrous to think that Lincoln and Kennedy could also have been victims of conspiracies and that the plots were covered up?


Be alert Conspiracy theories have been associated with paranoia and ir- rationality. But Dentith rejects such words. “I think,” he writes, “any historically or politically literate citizen should at least en- tertain the possibility that a) there’s a conspiracy going on at a high level somewhere and b) governments, corporations and influential institutions generally have a history of conspiring.” Adds Uscinski: “The whole point of democracy and electing lead- ers is that we don’t trust people to hold power for a long time.” Knowing that the CIA’s MKUltra was a reality can make people


suspect that, indeed, the NSA is probably spying extensively on American citizens, as Edward Snowden’s leaks of thousands of classified NSA documents to the press lead us to believe. A study informs us that once Facebook aficionados have posted more than 227 “likes,” Facebook knows more about them than their spouse. Without conspiracy theorizing, the authors of the study write, “knowledge of people’s personalities can also be used to manipulate and influence them.” There is a conspiracy theory floating around, report Uscinski


and Parent, that Facebook was created and financed by secre- tive US government agencies hell-bent on mining the personal information of millions “to gather as much information as pos- sible about everyone, in a centralized location.” Yet Facebook is only one component of a vastly spreading


matrix. Increasingly, the Internet of Things will be “spying” on everyone’s fridge, car and stereo system. Never mind imagining a conspiracy; it is obvious that the collection of all that informa- tion, if it were to fall into the hands of malicious conspirators, could give them huge powers of manipulation and coercion. Fillion is right: conspiracy theories per se are not irrational or


lunatic. “I think that it’s part of a sane attitude to entertain the possibility of conspiracies,” he says. “In these times of potential control and surveillance, a certain level of alertness and suspi- cion is indicated.”


YAN BARCELO is a Montreal-based writer and contributing editor to CPA Magazine


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