by Jonathan Kay
In many cases, this conspiracist reflex has blended with tribalism, the human instinct that causes us to rally around our own kin groups, and demonize outsiders—especially during times of conflict or crisis. The most venerable example is the blood libel against Jews that periodically gained a following in medieval European societies (and still pops up in Muslim countries), according to which Jews were accused of killing gentile children and using their blood for the production of their Passover matzos. Such anti-Semitic conspiracy theories have been around in recognizable form since at least the time of the Crusades, when bellicosity toward Muslims morphed into a more general form of religious xenophobia.
The Crusades also led to a second and distinct form of conspiracism—one directed toward the Knights Templar and similarly secretive groups of monk-warriors. While these holy legions originally were organized to fight in the Middle East, they eventually set up banks and commercial networks, and exerted a sometimes malign influence on domestic affairs. As Daniel Pipes wrote in his 1997 book Conspiracy: How The Paranoid Style Flourishes And Where It Comes From, the Knights Templar “had a conspiratorial air about them . . . At the initiation ceremony, a candidate was told that ‘of our order you only see the surface which is the outside,’ implying that something very secret took place behind closed doors. At the end of the initiation, each knight kissed the adept on the mouth, an act with obvious homosexual overtones . . . Together, the spectacular rise, great power, and grisly end of the Templars [at the hands of King Philip IV of France] turned them into a permanent feature of European conspiracy theories.”
By modern standards, these theories were simple narratives—folk tales for peasants—that purported to describe finite, localized plots against this or that monarch or town. But this began to change in the eighteenth century, as capitalism, industrialization, and urbanization transformed Europe. The French Revolution, in particular, demonstrated that a relatively small group of ideologically motivated radicals, armed with a universalist creed, could propel a state, and possibly even a whole continent, into mass upheaval. “If French fears from 1725 of a ‘famine plot’ to starve the country symbolize conspiracy theories before the French Revolution—a limited scheme aimed at monetary gain—fears after 1789 are captured by a supposed . . . plot to eliminate the monarchy, the church, and private property,” wrote Pipes. “Just as the conspirators grew far more alarming, so did their goals—and the theories about them.”
It is no coincidence that conspiracism took its modern form at the same time Edmund Burke was writing Reflections on the Revolution in France, which many historians identify as the original manifesto of conservative thought. Like the conspiracist creeds of the era, Burke’s influential ideology was rooted in a nostalgia—or at least a respect—for the old order, and a (justified) fear that the revolutionary, abstract doctrines animating Europe would lead to tyranny and chaos.
The Freemasons and Jews figured prominently in conspiracy theories about the French Revolution that emerged in the early nineteenth century. But there was a new villain, as well—the Order of the Illuminati, a secret society founded on the precepts of humanitarian rationalism by an eccentric Bavarian law professor in 1776. Unlike the benign Masons, the Illuminati operated as a genuine cult, imposing secret rites on members, and forbidding interaction with outside society. Though the group would fizzle within a decade, and had only a few thousand members at its height, it remains an enduring fixation among conspiracists—including novelist Dan Brown, who put a lurid pseudo-Illuminati plot to destroy Vatican City at the center of his 2000 book, Angels & Demons.
Even before the French Revolution, the Marquis de Luchet warned Europe that the Illuminati aimed to “govern the world.” Later on, in 1797, Scottish conspiracist John Robison wrote that the Illuminati had been formed “for the express purpose of rooting out all the religious establishments, and overturning all the existing governments of Europe.” A year later, Augustin Barruel gave the Illuminati a starring role in his four-volume work Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism—in which he argued that the French Revolution resulted from a “triple conspiracy” of Freemasons, Illuminati, and anti-Christians who aimed at achieving the “overthrow of the altar, the ruin of the throne, and the dissolution of all civil society.” His list of conspirators included many of the greatest minds of the Enlightenment, including Voltaire, whom Barruel imagines to be the French Revolution’s true architect.
Foreshadowing the New World Order paranoia of the John Birch Society and other twentieth-century conspiracist groups, Barruel warned of a godless world republic that would be built on the ashes of the Vatican and the world’s royal palaces. Within a few years, these dark rhapsodies were co-opted wholesale by anti-Semites (who simply replaced “Illuminati” with “Jews” in their propaganda), and would become the dominant theme of the anti-Semitic literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—including The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, whose enormous influence on modern conspiracism will be discussed in detail in Chapter 2.
During the twentieth century, conspiracism became the animating creed at both extremes of Europe’s political spectrum.
On the Far Right, fascists idealized the notion of a single-party state, infused with a single collective cultural identity, and launched murderous propaganda campaigns against any group that stood accused of thwarting this monolithic agenda. Adolf Hitler took this view to its defining extreme, basing his entire political philosophy on a delusional fear that Jews were conspiring to destroy not only the Aryan nation, but all of humanity. “Should the Jew, with the aid of his Marxist creed, triumph over the people of this world, his Crown will be the funeral wreath of mankind, and this planet will once again follow its orbit through ether, without any human life on its surface, as it did millions of years ago,” he wrote in Mein Kampf. “And so I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator. In standing guard against the Jew I am defending the handiwork of the Lord.”
But conspiracism put down strong roots on the Far Left, too—fed both by Soviet propaganda about the United States, and the inherent nature of radical left-wing ideology, which presents capitalists as scheming parasites seeking to rob the proletariat of the value of their labor. Or as Marx himself put it in Das Kapital: “Within the capitalist system, all methods for raising the social productivity of labour are put into effect at the cost of the individual worker; all means for the development of production undergo a dialectical inversion so that they become means of domination and exploitation of the producers; they distort the worker into a fragment of a man.” (This aspect of Marxism helps explain why former Marxist radicals so easily leap to other militant creeds, such as fascism, Islamism, or—as with WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah, profiled later in this book—ultrapopulist conservatism. Notwithstanding the numbing jargon about Hegelian dialectics and such, the real lure of Marxism for these ideologues is its fundamentally conspiracist vision of society.)
In the United States, where neither Marxism nor fascism ever became truly mass movements, conspiracism followed a different and more complicated pattern—one rooted in three intertwined influences.
First was America’s religious tradition of apocalyptic millenarianism—a subject discussed in more detail in Chapter 4, in the specific context of Christian conservative conspiracy theories involving Barack Obama. It is a tradition that dates back to New England’s witch hunts and the “Beast-watching” early Puritans, who linked the seven-headed beast of Revelation 13 with the Catholic Church and, later on, the British Empire. Many American conspiracists hitched their appeal to this Revelation-inspired vision of End Times, assigning the various roles of False Prophet, Antichrist, and Satan to popery, the Elders of Zion, the USSR, Nazi Germany, secular humanism, a “New World Order,” or neoconservatism. The United Nations, which the rest of the civilized world tends to regard as a largely benign (if incompetent) organization, is an especially popular target: In the best-selling Left Behind series of n
ovels, which portray earth in the agonies of the Rapture, the Antichrist figure takes the form of UN Secretary General “Nicolae Carpathia” (so-named, social critic Charles Pierce has quipped, “because the authors didn’t think of calling him ‘Evil J. Transylvania’ ”). According to this vision, the political battle for America is in fact a battle for the cosmos itself—with the conspiracists assigning to themselves the role of enlightened Prophets.
The second major influence on American conspiracism is the country’s unique political culture. From early on in the nation’s history (before it even became a nation, in fact), Americans viewed the United States as a land of economic and political freedom—a place where sturdy, independent yeomen could make their way in the world without much help from government or entanglement with their neighbors. This muscular, independent attitude extended into the realm of philosophy: Born amid the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on individual reason unfettered by authority, America produced a lively culture of homegrown inventors and scientists. As time would tell, it was also more hospitable than the nations of Europe to intellectual outsiders—oddballs, dissidents, heretics, fussy autodidacts, and skeptics—the sort of men who we would now call “cranks.”
But this worldview sowed the seeds of its own destruction. Unfettered American capitalism in the nineteenth century permitted a concentration of economic power in a small handful of banks and conglomerates, whose abuses summoned into being a populist backlash, which in turn spurred the creation of an intrusive regulatory state. Meanwhile, on the international stage, America became liberty’s defender of last resort in the face of the Soviet threat—a campaign that ultimately was successful, but only through the empowerment of what Dwight Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex.” The combined result was a country where the ideals of liberty conflicted with a reality in which power became concentrated in the hands of large, faceless corporate and governmental organizations whose very existence seemed a malign affront to the open character of America’s early years.
The third major influence on the development of American conspiracism was technology. In the early and mid-twentieth century, in particular, Americans were confronted with a range of powerful new machines—from mass communications, to invasive medical imaging, to space travel, to nuclear energy—that were controlled by a new class of menacing technocrats. Thanks to America’s massive wealth in the postwar years, the pace of progress was much faster than in other developed nations. While the new technologies improved the material lives of most Americans, they also increased their dependence on the government and large corporations, thereby increasing the scope for mass paranoia.
It is out of this three-part mix—religious apocalypticism, political populism, and rapid technological advancement—that America’s unique brand of conspiracism emerged. I call the resulting pastiche “flowchart conspiracism”—because its trademark feature is the imagining of a complex organizational chart linking all of America’s power centers, from media companies to drug makers to the CIA, to one central, all-controlling secular Antichrist.
Populism and Paranoia: How Politics Shaped American Conspiracism
From the Populist movement of the late nineteenth century, to the KKK, to the backlash against FDR’s New Deal, to McCarthyism, the militia movement, Ross Perot, the films of Michael Moore, and the red-state rhetoric of Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and Lou Dobbs, American conspiracism has reflected a consistent political theme: Some cabal of coastal political elites, Ivy league intellectuals, “bankers” (sometimes, but not always, a code word for Jews), and corporate oligopolists are conspiring to sell out the nation’s ordinary, hardscrabble working people. As I was reminded by a sixteen-year-old Minnesotan Truther whom I heard fulminating in New York City against “a tyrannical government and their oppressive regime of bankers, front men, and puppets” and “thieves who take our hard-earned money and ship it off to foreigners,” much of the modern conspiracist mindset, and even its terminology, remains frozen in place from the Jacksonian movement of the early nineteenth century.
If conspiracism may be seen as a collective ailment, then the United States was infected at birth: British colonial rule under King George III truly was designed to keep Americans in a state of perpetual subservience, and to steal the fruits of their industry. Over time, resentment of this fact grew into a deep suspicion of government power more generally. “Society in every state is a blessing,” Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense. “But government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one . . . Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise.”
The violent boom-and-bust cycles of America’s young, rapidly industrializing, hypercapitalist economy provided conspiracists with plenty of growth opportunities—but with an important New World twist. The authors of the Protocols and the conspiracist tracts that followed in the wake of the French Revolution were reactionaries who urged a return to a preindustrial, precapitalist Christian utopia ruled by benign, hereditary kings. In the United States, it was the opposite: American conspiracy theorists cast themselves as defenders of the revolution, on guard to protect their noble values from a backsliding into monarchist tyranny.
“A great part of both the strength and weakness of our national existence lies in the fact that Americans do not abide very quietly the evils of life,” wrote historian Richard Hofstadter in 1955. “We are forever restlessly pitting ourselves against them . . . whether it be the force represented by the ‘gold bugs,’ the Catholic Church, big business, corrupt politicians, the liquor interests and the saloons, or the Communist Party, and that this evil is something that must be not merely limited, checked and controlled but rather extirpated root and branch at the earliest possible moment.”
In his Pulitzer Prize–winning classic, The Age of Reform, and again in his famous essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Hofstadter traced the roots of the McCarthyite conspiracism he witnessed in his own era to eighteenth-century Jeffersonians and Federalists, who accused one another of seeking to reestablish a monarchy or subvert America’s Christian character. The latter theme would endure throughout the nineteenth century—particularly in regard to Catholics, whose imagined role as Vatican-directed fifth columnists fueled the creation of the Order of the Star Spangled Banner (the Know-Nothings), as well as several short-lived anti-immigrant political parties. The Ku Klux Klan, though remembered by historians primarily for its violent campaigns against blacks, also trafficked in anti-Catholic propaganda—including the theory that Washington, D.C.’s Catholic churches were secret military bases from which papist hordes would emerge to install the pope as America’s president. Even as late as the mid-twentieth century, it was not uncommon to hear claims that—in one Protestant propagandist’s words—“Jesuits are prowling about all parts of the United States in every possible disguise, expressly to . . . disseminate Popery.”
Conspiracy theories based on secret societies also gained adherents in nineteenth-century America. Following the mysterious 1826 disappearance of a disgruntled Freemason from Batavia, New York, anti-Masonry activists spawned a single-issue political party that managed to capture two state governorships before withering. Thanks to the stateside penetration of two influential (and poisonously anti-Semitic) English paranoiacs, Nesta Webster and Edith Starr Miller, anti-Illuminati conspiracism, too, enjoyed episodic popularity. Some Federalists even accused the Democratic-Republicans of being in the Illuminati’s grip—quite an amazing claim given that not a single Illuminati leader is known to have ever traversed the Atlantic.
The most profound manifestation of conspiracism in nineteenth-century America came through the Populist movement that reached its zenith following the collapse of food, commodity, and land prices in the 1890s. As farmers’ profits dwindled, many country dwellers (not entirely without basis) blamed their troubles on industrialization, immigration, financial speculation, corporate conglomera
tes, and the rise of urban machine politics. Their vision of America was famously captured by the sketch of an octopus with tentacles encircling all of the nation’s workers and industries—an image that would go on to become an enduring staple of anti-Semitic paranoia (albeit with zoological variations: while many editions of the Protocols retained the octopine image, the Jew appeared in a British edition as a snake, and in a French edition as a spider).
Such notions eventually led to the broad notion that America’s rural yeomen were locked in an existential war with bankers, railroad owners, mining magnates, and other conniving urban sophisticates. As one manifesto circulated by the Populist Party put it: “There are but two sides in the conflict that is being waged in this country today. On the one side are the allied hosts of monopolies, the money power, great trusts and railroad corporations, who seek the enactment of laws to benefit them and impoverish the people. On the other side are the farmers, laborers, merchants, and all others who produce wealth and bear the burdens of taxation. The one represents the wealthy and powerful classes who want the control of the Government to plunder the people. The other represents the people, contending for equality before the law, and the rights of man. Between these two there is no middle ground.”
