Since before the fall of the Alamo, Texas has served as an incubator for unhinged conspiracy theories about the motives behind the Texas Revolution, feared rebellions by the enslaved, Mexican plans to retake Texas, the supposed plot by Franklin Roosevelt to impose communism in the United States, why water is being fluoridated, who killed Kennedy, and the various fever dreams of the QAnon movement. In this episode, we explore what makes Texans, and Americans in general, particularly susceptible to conspiracy theories and what emotional comfort these ideas give believers.
Sources:
Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America https://www.ucpress.edu/books/a-culture-of-conspiracy/paper
Mark Fenster, Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture https://www.upress.umn.edu/9780816654949/conspiracy-theories/
Edward H. Miller, Nut Country: Right-Wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/N/bo19197692.html
Col Zone Media.
I'm Michael Phillips, an historian, the author of a book about racism in Dallas called White Metropolis, and the co author of an upcoming book about the eugenics movement in Texas called The Purifying Knife.
And I'm Stephen Monchelli, an investigative reporter and columnist in Texas who covers political extremism and beyond.
Since the late nineteen nineties, Alex Jones built an extensive media empire, spreading out landish conspiracy theories from his home base in Austin, Texas. A native of the Dallas suburb of Rockwall, over the years, Jones has claimed that the Apollo eleven moon landing was fake, so too, he said, was the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting. He claimed with stage to justify new gun control laws. According to Jones, the US government can control the weather has intentionally caused floods and other weather disasters to punish Texas and other concerns of the States. He has insisted that chemicals intentionally placed in American drinking water are turning frogs gay, part of an experiment by the American government seeking a way to undermine the nuclear family. While peddling dubious supplements with unproven health benefits. Jones began his broadcasting career with a call in public access cable TV show, before moving on to radio and then online. In spite of his outlandish claims, in twenty fifteen, Jones was able to set off a panic in Texas that inspired action from Governor Greg Abbott.
Now to a Texas sized conspiracy theory, sparking headlines across the country, including this week in The New York Times, the theory that an upcoming Pentagon training exercise is actually part of a plan to impose martial law. To many, it's far fetched, but not to some of the top politicians in the lone star state.
The conspiracy theory Jones described on his Info War show spun in even wilder directions. The Army troops participating in the Jade Helm military exercise, panicked, right wingers said, would turn on the local population. Guns would be seized from private citizens, and local walmarts would be converted into vast holding cells where those opposing Obama's plan to seize dictatorial power would be imprisoned. According to these sorts of theories, these accusations went viral and a military spokesman got waylaid by angry questions at a Bastrup County Commissioner's Court meeting held near the Central Texas staging area for jade Helm.
Armed men in.
Trucks patrolled in Bastrup County and surrounding communities, and a private group called Counter jade Helm spied on the movement of troops and military vehicles while they quizzed residents for any intelligence they may have gathered on the impending alleged coup d'eta.
The crazier the conspiracy theory got, the more Texas's far right political leaders were willing to pander toge Jones and Elk. Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered the Texas National Guard to monitor US Army troops near Austin.
We're playing a pivotal role of government, and that is to provide information until people have questions.
Texas Senator Ted Cruz pledged that he would demand answers from the Pentagon about the military's intentions and said he completely understood the widespread paranoia.
You know, I understand the concern that's been raised by a lot of citizens about jade Hell.
We have seen for six years.
A federal government of disrespecting the liberty of the citizens and that produces fear.
Suffice it to say, the Obama administration did not overthrow the state government. The intense outrage and fear generated over army combat preparations might have seen perplexing to those outside of Texas, a state that prides itself on being patriotic and pro military. However, seething distrust of liberal elites is a lucrative business in alex Jones built a fortune of two hundred and seventy million with his internet show and sales of dubious health and survivalist products advertised on those broadcasts. This is nothing new south of the Red River. From the beginning of its history, the state has been an incubator for outlandish and occasionally not completely unreasonable conspiracy theories.
After Texas violently separated from Mexico in eighteen thirty six, white Texans spent the next decade fearing their southern neighbor, a nation that saw the Texas Revolution as illegitimate and wanted to regain control of the breakaway province. Meanwhile, those same white Texans viewed the African Americans they enslaved with suspicion bordering on dread, knowing that their black captives desperately wanted freedom and might use violence to liberate themselves. This created an atmosphere of uncertainty and distrust that fed conspiracy theories of all sorts. After their rebellion against Mexico, Texans wanted to become part of the United States, but they were forced to spend almost a full decade as an independent republic because of well founded suspicions held by American abolitionists that the Texas Revolution was a part of a plot to add a slave state to the Union.
A decade later, the tide shifted and Texas was hurriedly annexed in eighteen forty five after widespread rumors gripped Washington, d C Of a British plot to a next Texas and converted to a haven for African Americans escaping slavery. In the eighteen fifties, even prominent Texans like Sam Houston flocked to the American Party, also known as the know Nothings, that claimed the Pope had ordered Catholics from Ireland Germany to immigrate to the United States in order to take the country over and hand power over to the Vatican Panics O were suspected rebellions by the enslaved, gripped Anglo Texans in eighteen thirty five, eighteen thirty eight, eighteen forty one, and in eighteen fifty six went perhaps as many as four hundred African Americans held in bondage in Colorado County in south central Texas apparently plotted to rise up against their white oppressors and battle their way to freedom in Mexico, where slavery had been abolished.
Eighteen sixty, construction workers carelessly tossed matches into a pile of wood in Dallas during a hot, drought ridden summer. The blaze that resulted destroyed much of what was then only a village. Immediately, suspecting that enslaved arsonists had set the fire as part of a planned revolution, whites and Dallas tortured and whipped almost every enslaved person in the county in search of scapegoats. Eventually, they hanged three African Americans and set off what would become known as the Texas Troubles. Fires broke out across the state, and each got blamed on black suspects and their supposed white abolitionist instigators, often men from northern States. As one historian put it, white Texan enslavers decided it was better to quote hanging ninety nine innocent men than to let one guilty pass. Acting on little evidence, mobs lynched as many as eighty enslaved African American men and thirty seven accused white abolitionists. By the time the panic burned out in September.
A wave of labor unrest, including the Great Southwest Railroad Strike of eighteen eighty six and the rise of the Populace movement, which called for the government seizure railroads and telegraph lines, in addition to a global panic amongst the well to do about anarchism after a series of bombings in Europe and even the United States from the eighteen eighties to just after World War One convinced economic elites in Texas that revolution was in the air. The ku Klux Klan, which in its original incarnation during reconstruction served as a goon squad to keep newly freed African American labor under tight control, came to dominate cities like Dallas in the nineteen twenties, where one and every three eligible men were members of the KKK at its peak, the KKK charged that both Jews and Catholics were conspiring to control the world. Texas politicians like Representative John Box of Texas, in a column in Henry Ford's anti Semitic newspaper The Dearborn Independent, charged that Jews had manipulated the Congress to add loopholes to American immigration laws passed in nineteen twenty one nineteen twenty four in order to let Jewish people escaping the Russian Empire into the United States as part of a scheme to undermine American society.
As oil millionaires and billionaires built their wealth over the twentieth century, they became a force in conspiratorial faw right politics in Texas. Starting in the nineteen thirties, they mobilized against Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, which they insisted was a part of an international communist plan to overthrow capitalism around the planet. Anti communism, anti Semitism, and hostility. The post World War II African American civil rights movement blended seamlessly in the conspiratorial imaginations of the faw right in the lone Star state ideas that reached a national audience in large part because of oil money.
Owen Beatty, the longtime chairman of the English Department's Southern Methodist University in Dallas, in nineteen fifty one, authored one of the first and perhaps the best selling of all time, book promoting Holocaust denial, Iron Curtain over America. Beatty claimed that the Jews of today were not the Hebrew heroes of what Christians called the Old Testament. Instead, they were descended from a sinister Asian trot called the Kazars. They converted to Judaism around the year eight hundred. Too arrogant to assimilate with Christian Europe, Baty wrote, Kazar's undermined society under their stolen identities and caused the Communist Revolution in Russian nineteen eighteen. After immigrating to the United States in large numbers, they took over the Democratic Party, Batty said, and moved it to the radical left. Beatty also claimed that Jews controlled Franklin Roosevelt's administration and pushed it into war against Hitler's Germany, which Beatty described in his book as quote the historic bulwark of Christian Europe. A mere six years after Soviet and American troops that liberated Nazi concentration camps. Betty claimed that most of the victims there died from disease and the Holocaust was a fraud used after nineteen forty eight to blackmail the West into political and financial support of Israel. The SMU professor urged the United States to expel Jews from the United States.
Rather than earning him scorn, Bad's virulently hateful anti Jewish rants won him a large following. His book, Iron Curtain Over America, went through nine printings. By nineteen fifty three, The Public Affairs Luncheon Club, a women's organization, adopted a unanimous resolution backing Bad and requesting that SMU investigate alleged Communist influence on the university's faculty politics and values. Beady taught at SMU until his retirement in nineteen fifty seven, two years after a panic over allegedly read art during which the conservative Dallas Patriotic Council accused the Dallas Musi of Art of intentionally promoting quote subversive artists who were ostensibly part of communist front groups connected to the Soviet Union after.
World War Two in the establishment of communist regimes in Eastern Europe and in China. The uber wealthy giants of the Texas oil industry, to a large degree, funded what came to be known as McCarthyism. Clinton Murchison, whose son in nineteen sixty became owner of the Dallas Cowboys National Football League team, became one of the largest financial contributors the red baiting Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin. In Houston, hard right organizations like the Minute Women Fought against school integration took over the school board, firing the assistant superintendent, George eBay because he previously lived in California and Oregon, where he had nice things to say about Roosevelt's new deal in the African American freedom struggle. A math instructor got fired after he carelessly common in a teacher's lounge. They supported Adelie Stevenson, the Liberal Democratic part Party nominee for president. In nineteen fifty two and nineteen fifty six, the Easton School Board yanked books from campus libraries that said positive things about the United Nations, while right wingers in Dallas force the City Library and the Museum of Fine Arts. The demand artists like Diego Rivera and Pablo Picasso because of their supposed communist sympathies.
But before we get into that, a quick ad break one Dallas oil.
Magnate who built a mansion intentionally designed to be a bigger duplicate of George Washington's Mount Vernon estate. He used his wealth to broadcast extremist fever dreams in the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties. His name was hl Hunt, and he was profiled by the BBC in the nineteen sixties.
But as well as being perhaps the most apprugal, the most stingy plutocrat of Texas, hl Hunt is probably the most controversial. He is a fervent advocate of right wing, some would say reactionary causes. He is against the UN, against the War On Party, against Medicare, against central government aid of any sort. He would rather Washington didn't rule the United States at all, and in his ideal LAMB votes would be distributed according to the amount of taxes who paid more than most Texans. Even he is inclined to see communists under every couch and behind every curtain. To Hunt, mankind is divided into communists and constructives. His private word for anti communists, you are either for him or aganim. He brooks no halfway position.
A health faddist who avoided whitebread and sugar, Hunt believed his diet of largely raw vegetables might actually allow him to achieve immortality. He also thought he had psychic abilities, lived as a secret bigamist, and published pamphlets such as Hitler was a Liberal, an early prototype of Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk. Hunt tried to create an alternative right wing media infrastructure, ding a nationwide radio program and pamphlet subscription called Lifeline that promoted conspiracy theories from coast to coast.
Didn't time for a lifetime.
Is around the world.
Every leftist phrase and cliche of the past half century now has the hollow.
Ring of mythology.
This is freedom Talk number fifty three Brendan cupp is all available at the rate of three for twenty five cents from Lifeline, Dallas, Texas seven five two o six.
I'll be back after this message from our sponsor.
The Lifeline show was hosted by a former FBI agent named Dan Smoot and broadcasts on more than eighty television one hundred and fifty radio stations. Hunt believed that democracy was the instrument through which wealth would be seized from billionaires such himself and redistributed to the lazy and the worthless. Hunt once rage at Smoot when the Lifeline hosts claimed on air that democracy was a political outgrowth of the teachings of Jesus Christ. Hunt corrected smooth, condemning democracy is the handwork of the devil. In a phony liberal form of watered down communism. Hunt innovated in number of ways to alarm audiences about far left plots.
During the last two years, hl Hunt has added another emotive missile to his armory, his league of so called youth freedom speakers, engaging young teenagers drilled to deliver three minute burst of his propaganda to rotary clubs and Bible classes.
Many people in the United States really don't believe that communism is a serious threat. Well, these people are in for a big shock, because the communists have every intention of doing exactly what they've said they'll do, and they do not hesitate to use force and violence anytime they think that it will further their cause. Now, I don't pretend to know all the answers, but I do know that it is our duty to get out and warn others of the serious threat that we are facing. We have got to get out and tell others of the subversive movements that are going on right here under our very own noses. It's time to do away with this attitude. Oh, it can't happen here. Will communists bury us? Will we face fine squads as in Cuba? And will our little bitty children become slaves? Ladies and gentlemen. The answer rests in the hands of you and others like you.
Thank you.
For much of the twentieth century, Dallas had built up a reputation as a clean, dull, modern, and efficiently run city. By the nineteen fifties, however, it had also acquired a reputation as the capital of crackpots and conspiracy theorists, a development that historian Edward H. Miller would describe in his book Not the Country. In nineteen fifty four, Dallas elected a far right House representative, Republican Bruce Alger. Less than a week prior to the nineteen sixty presidential election between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon, a pro Alger mob assaulted in spat on the Democratic vice presidential nominee and then Texas Senator Lyndon Johnson and his wife Ladybird as they left the Adolphus Hotel in downtown Dallas, alger joined the protesters who held signs with slogans that said LBJ sold out to Yankee Socialists. Soon thereafter, Major General Edwin Walker, who inspired the deranged fictional character General Jack d Ripper, the person responsible for global nuclear holocaust, in the nineteen sixty four film at Doctor Strangelove called Dallas Home.
I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, communist in doctrination, communists subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.
Before filmmaker Stanley Kubrick turned Walker into an unforgettable caricature. The real life Walker achieved infamy commanding an infantry division in what was then Western Germany. President Kennedy pressured Walker to resign because he repeatedly lectured soldiers under his command to vote for far right wing political candidates. He also distributed among the troops literature from the conspiracy theory promoting far right John Birch Society, and he encouraged them to join the John Birch Society, formed in nineteen fifty eight, opposed American membership in the United Nations, which it claimed was part of a global communist conspiracy to enslave free peoples around the world. The fringe organization, established by former candy manufacturer Robert Welsh, accused all American presidents from Franklin Roosevelt to Kennedy of being secret communists under the command of the Soviet government.
The John Birch Society also saw the African American civil rights movement as part of a Bolshevik conspiracy to divide the country, and argued that efforts of towns and cities after World War II to add fluoride to public water supplies was part of a sinister scheme to weaken men physically and make them less able to resist the radical takeover the United States. That particular Bircher conspiracy theory made a long lasting impact on the American psyche. Cities across the United States banned fluoridated water today. That John Birch Society is still active in North Texas, where recent gubernatorial candidate and car dealer Don Huffines has published anti fluoridation essays on the Dallas Express, a right wing website that repurposed the name of the historic black newspaper that went defunct in the nineteen seventies.
Edwin Walker's devotion to the John Birch movement cost him his military career. Under pressure from Defense Secretary Robert mcmara, Walker retired and moved to Dallas, where he found a friendly political environment. The national far right saw him as a martyr to Kennedy's supposedly out of control leftism, and he received financial support from fellow devotee of the John Birch Society hl Hunt. In nineteen sixty one, Walker made the cover of Newsweek as a leader of the New Right, and in nineteen sixty two he entered the race for Texas Governor.
To all victims of communist tyranny throughout the world, I send this word the hour of your deliverance is approaching. To patriots in every land Korea, China, the Ukraine, the Baltic Nations, Poland, Hungary, East Germany, the Congo, Cuba, and every other land strickened by the monster of communism. I say, for the time lie low, preparing your hearts for liberation. Do not expose yourselves to the brutal requital of a monster temporarily in power.
Walker was a painfully dull public speaker. In the end, he couldn't bring his version of deliverance to his own state, finishing a distant sixth in the nineteen sixty two gubinatorial race. That would not prevent him and his allies from creating Mayhem over the following months, he got arrested and was ordered to be psychiatrically evaluated by Attorney General Robert Kennedy after he incited racial violence during the integration of the University of Mississippi in September nineteen sixty two. Adelaide Stevenson, John Kennedy's ambassador of the United Nations, would confront Walker and a model of his followers when the diplomat visited Big d on October twenty sixth, nineteen sixty three. Stevenson was shouted down as he attempted to deliver a un day's speech to Dallas Council on World Affairs.
Shall we get on with the business.
Of the meeting? Surely, surely, my dear friend, I don't have to come here from Illinois to teach Texas.
Manors, do I?
Outside Memorial Auditorium Theater, where Stevenson delivered his speech, Walker had gathered a furious gang of middle and upper classmen and women who rocked his limousine back and forth while it waited to whisk him away to safety, and surrounded the ambassador when he stepped outside. When he finally returned to Washington, D C. Stevenson warned the administration about the intense and extremist atmosphere in Dallas, where President Kennedy was planning a visit meant to heal a rift between the conservative and liberal wings of the Democratic Party in Texas.
On the morning in November twenty second, nineteen sixty three, Kennedy and his entourage felt for voting as they prepared for a short airplane draft from Fort Worth to Dallas. The president just examined a full page ad in the far right Dallas Morning News that featured a bold face headline welcome mister Kennedy to Dallas. The advertisement, paid for in part by H. L. Hunt's son, Nelson bunker Hunt and the future owner of the Dallas Cowboys, HR bum Bright, featured accusations that Kennedy was soft on communism around the world and radicals at home, while persecuting conservatives who criticized them. The same morning, a group distributed leaflets designed like a wanted poster with front and side photos of the President with the caption wanted for treason. How can people say such things? The President said to First Lady Jackie Kennedy, We're heading into nut Country. Soon. The Kennedys would make their faithful flight to Dallas, and the President would die from an assassin's bullet shortly after noon.
The President's murder spawned a cottage industry of conspiracy theorists. Some said the President had been murdered by the mafia, angered because they had been investigated by the President's brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Others blamed Teamster's president Jimmy Hoffa, who also had been the subject of criminal probes by the Justice Department. Others suspected assassination plotters included Cuban leader Fidel Castro, who had himself been targeted for assassination attempts by the Kennedy administration, exiled Cubans in Florida, angered because the President had not fully supported the attempted overthrow of Castro during the nineteen sixty one Bay of Pigs invasion, and even the Soviets. One of the more elaborate theories involved an alleged plot hatched by American military leaders and CIA agents, angered that Kennedy supposedly wanted to end American involvement in Vietnam. Finally, others, said Lyndon Johnson, order to hit on the chief executive because he wanted to grab power. Or maybe others said, Kennedy die because of combination of some or all of the above, having made enemies with the intelligence agencies under his command, who he had said he would dash to the wins if they continued to do things that were against what he saws in the best interests of the United States. Quote President shot one hundred twenty nine times from forty three different angles. A satirical headline from The Onion later.
Asserted sometimes conspiracy theories have deadly consequences. William L. Pierre spent his teen years attending a military academy in Dallas as a city student, anti communist dread and any Semitic hatred. As a young adult, he had joined the John Birch Society, but grew frustrated because there wasn't racist enough it. Became a leading figure in the American Nazi Party at the age of forty one formed the Neo Nazi National Alliance. Beginning in nineteen seventy five, he published in serial form one of the most influential examples of white supreme literature, The Turner Diaries, a novel which told the story of white nationalist revolution in the United States in the near future. This revolt is sparked by a Jewish authored law outlying private ownership of guns. The hero, Earl Turner, joins an underground terrorist army, the organization which battles a Jewish plot to destroy America not just through gun control, but also through uncontrolled non white immigration and by using rock music and drugs to encourage interracial sects. At one point, to save the white race, Turner blows up the FBI National headquarters in Washington, d C. With a truck bomb.
In the novel, racist revolutionaries then take over Vandenberg Air Force Base in southern California and sees its nuclear missiles, which they later use on cities across the nation. While ethnically cleansing California of non whites. They hang sixty thousand so called race traders during the Day of the Rope, a phrase you may find familiar if you've ever looked at white supremacist posts online. In the end the books, heer Earl Turner finally defeats the system by flying a crop duster armed with a small nuclear weapon into the Pentagon.
White nationalists have since seen the Turner Diaries as both an accurate description of the modern world and as a manual on how to win a race war. From nineteen eighty three to nineteen eighty four, The Order, a white supremacist terrorist group that took its name from the Secret Circle. The fictional Earl Turner joins, robbed a pornography shop, banks, and armored cars, hoisting more than eight million dollars. They later distributed to several white supremacist groups with the intent of funding a white revolution. Along the way, they assassinated Jewish radio talk show hosts Alan Berg. The Turner Diary became the favorite novel of Timothy McVeigh, a bitter, disgruntled veteran in the nineteen ninety one Gulf War who saw the deadly confrontation between the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol to back firearms and the gun totting branch Davidian religious sect in Waco, Texas. On April nineteenth, nineteen ninety three as a major step and a government plan to seize firearms from law abiding Americans.
McVeigh had spent years selling copies of The Turner Diaries at gun shows. He retaliated against what he saw as his government oppressors by blowing up the Alfred Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on the second anniversary of the Waco configuration. He used a truck bomb, facing his attack in part on the fictitious bombings of the FBI headquarters in William Pierce's novel The Turner Diaries also depicted a deadly attack on the US Capitol. Some of the pro Trump rioters who assaulted the Capitol on January sixth erected gallows and livestreamed their crimes as they joked about hanging politicians, comparing it to the day of rope, Pierce described in his pro Nazi work of fiction, Stay.
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Kennedy was a classic Cold War liberal in support of an aggressive military intervention to stop Communist expansion abroad, and with varying degrees, a commitment economic and civil rights reforms at home. But because of his assassination by the twenty first century, many on the far right saw as a martyr to the liberal deep state. Beginning in twenty seventeen, a very online far right conspiracy theory arose that centered on cryptic messages first posted on the four chan message board and then on eight chan by an anonymous person who identified themselves as Q. The pseudonym was a reference to the Q Clearance, which gives government officials access to high level security secrets. Kennedy would be central in the imagination of what came to be known as the QAnon movement.
Q or Q and on developed a huge following that interpreted these confusing and often contradictory posts as actually revealing a secret global cabal that included top Democrats like Hillary Clinton and liberal celebrities like Tom Hanks. These people were all accused of being a part of a child sex trafficking ring in which the young victims were molested and tortured, and, in some interpretations of the theories, had their precious bodily fluids harvested to manufacture a drug known as adrenochrome, a drug that produces hallucinations and supposedly grants eternal youth. These stories resembled anti Semitic legends about Jews kidnapping Christian children before passover in order to use their blood in Monza bread, a trope or canard really that has become known as blood libel in the QAnon mythology. Donald Trump plans to conduct mass arrests and executions of these Satanic child molesters in an event called the Storm. Trump has wing and nodded to the q and On movement, encouraged believers, and even incorporated some of its key slogans in imagery in speeches and posts online, such as where we go on, we go All and as I've reported for Rolling Stone, a cult like spinoff group of q and On believers have repeatedly gathered at Daley Plaza, the site of JFK's murder, to wait for the prophesied return of JFK and his son, JFK Junior, who both are dead but these believers think were either miraculously resurrected or never actually dined, and have been secretly working with Trump to take down the aforementioned global Satanic pedophile cabal. Some believe that when JFK and JFK Junior finally reveal themselves, a sort of Kingdom of Righteousness will reign and good will ultimately prevail over evil.
Q and On believers were a heavy presence during the Capitol Insurrection in January sixth, twenty twenty one, and banners competed with Trump and Confederate battle flags for attention. And November that first year, we saw the first of series rallies that Steve just referred to. They went to a Daley plaza where President Kennedy had been murdered fifty eight years earlier. Over the course of many months, QAnon disciples kept returning to the site of JFK's death, some staying at a local hotel so they could be nearby when the Kennedy return happened. This was covered by Dallas ABC affiliate WFAA in November twenty twenty one. Reporter Kevin Reese interviewed some of the ones gathered at the Kennedy assassination site.
Word on the street is that Junior JFK Junior will show up and introduce his parents.
You're expecting JFK Junior.
Absolutely, Okay, how is that going to happen?
It never does. Are we going to see him today?
JFK Junior?
Yeah, that's whatever, we're hell of me.
We're hope and to hope and pray, and then after that he'll probably be the vice president with Trump.
Conspiracy theorists often pay a high personal price for beliefs that marginalize them from family, friends, and mainstream society.
There was one real truth several of these people agreed to talk about. But you got to understand that most of the world is going to think that's just crazy.
That's why half my family won't talk to me anymore. Then one my girlfriend thinks I've lost my mind.
With the return of Donald Trump to the White House on January twentieth, conspiracy theories will move from the fringe to the seat of power. JFK Junior won't emerge and grab the reins, but a different Kennedy will. Bobby Kennedy Junior. Bobby Kennedy Junior has insisted that Wi FI causes cancer and that AIDS might not be caused by HIV vaccines. He claims against overwhelming evidence, cause autism, antidepressants caused school shootings, and micals and water lead to gender dysphoria. One of these chemicals, RFK Junior insist might be an old obsession of the conspiratorial right.
I think fluoride is a poison becauses loss IQ in our developmental injuries. I think florid is.
On the way up. RFK Junior mind You is the nominee for the head of the Department of Health and Human Services and in a recent interview claimed that he was aided in his schoolwork through the recreational self medication of heroin. Trump has himself obsessively promoted his own sinister tales of the deep state that supposedly stole the twenty twenty election from him, and as we have said, has co opted some of the slogans of the QAnon movement. None of this, obviously, was disqualifying to a plurality of voters this past November. So why are people drawn to conspiracy theories? First off, they provide convenient explanations that can be broken down into sort of simple logics for people who may not have frameworks for understanding a complex world. And they also provide believers sort of new family and friends as they become increasingly alienated from their original family and friends, regardless of whatever plots they believe they have revealed. It's clear that conspiracy theorists of this sort. They don't believe that history is a product of class conflict, or imperialism or the global scramble for natural resources, not ahing like that. It's not shaped by political and economic alliances between elites, or irreversible transformations and technology that render old job skills irrelevant. There's no material analysis. All of this loss, all this fear, all this terrifying disruption of what is comfortably routine, they view, stems from a sinister plot, a plan that is hidden tightly by a small circle of elites, sort of cartoon villains with near superpowers that control the world. And if only the right people, the sort of heroes of the story of the movie that they think that they're watching, if only those people would step forward and pull off the mask of the villains, then everything would be set right.
These enemies of freedom somehow pull all the strings in sight unseen, manipulate every aspect of the world's politics, culture, and finance, manipulate elections, engineer depressions, urban riots, and even hurricanes. Yet for all their cleverness, they leave just enough clues so that amateur sleuths, if they are just smart enough, can crack the code. Conspiracy theories make history and understandable contests between ruthless bad guys and intrepid heroes, who then feel superior because they've unveiled the master plan. As they discover kindred spirits, they find community otherwise lacking in their lives. Perhaps, if just enough people know about the conspiracy, they hope the bad guys will fall and the millennium will follow. That fantasy offers a simpler, more emotionally satisfying vision of the future than planning on how to dismantle capitalism or figuring out how to persuade white people, for instance, surrender their privileges that come with skin color. Conspiracy theories are mostly a distraction, but unfortunately they are often from Oklahoma City to the US capital, a call for deadly action.
And while figures like hl hunt and their operations like Lifeline may be in the past, we have our own contemporary versions of this with roots in Texas. We now have Elon Musk who controls x formerly known as Twitter, in which he has used his platform with millions of followers to promote dangerous conspiracy theories like the Great Replacement theory, which we recorded a previous episode of this podcast about. Ultimately we are living in a culture that swims with conspiracy theories, and for us to make our way out of the rabbit hole, we're going to need some sort of framework for understanding the world, something that can help us better understand how we got here and where we're going. And no matter what that is, it certainly won't be something as simple as believing that we just have to pull off the mask of some villain and then everything will be set straight from there.
This is Michael Phillips and.
This is Stephen Monticelli.
Thanks for listening.
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