 Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Aaron Powell. I'm Trevor Burrus. Joining us today is Jesse Walker. He's books editor of Reason Magazine. He has written on topics ranging from pirate radio to copyright law to political paranoia. And he is author of the books Rebels on the Air and Alternative History of Radio in America and the United States of Paranoia, A Conspiracy Theory. Before we get to the meat of the book and your theories about conspiracy theories, how did you get into this topic in the first place? Yeah, well it's been an ongoing interest going back to my teens in a couple of different ways. The story I usually tell when people ask me that is just that I got interested in the stories that came out in the mid-1970s, the Church Committee investigations and so on, of the real misdeeds of the CIA and the FBI and IRS and so forth. And that while I was looking for books on that, I often found other books on the same shelf whose claims weren't quite as well grounded but which nonetheless were engaging to read. And so I got interested in both the actual covert action, the history of actual covert action and the history of the stories that people tell about covert action and sort of the imagination around it. And then the other side of that though which is a little harder to fit into that but is also part of the interest was that as a teenager, we were talking about this a little bit before the show, some friends of mine got into this game called Illuminati. And these were the friends who are doing all kinds of role playing games and stuff that I wasn't particularly into myself but they said, no, no, you'll like this one. Jesse, it's a card game, it's not a role playing game and it's funny and it's got all those conspiracy things that you enjoy reading about. And it was genuinely funny for those who've never seen this game as came out in the early 1980s and you got to play one of several different conspiracies trying to take over the world and they had dental conspiracies and other bizarre things. But it was clearly inspired by this book, actually Trilogy, but it had just been reissued in one volume called Illuminatis by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson which I also read. And so I got interested in things like the game Illuminati, the book Illuminatis, the Church of the Subgenius which was sort of a mock religion with elaborate conspiracy theories that was also sort of hitting popular culture around that time in the 80s. And what I, in this book I call the ironic style of conspiracy theories which is sort of people who like to play with conspiracy stories, not to believe them and not to debunk them but to have fun with them. And that has always been part of my sort of interest in the topic as well because, not just because I find it fun but because I think now there's a whole history of people having fun with it and that has in turn influenced the history of conspiracy theories. It's a weird feedback loop. It's a whole set of feedback loops and it's creating an amazing cacophony that's kind of cool to listen to. Would you ever consider yourself, well this probably will require defining the term but would you ever have been a conspiracy theorist as people popularly used that? Well, I mean there are conspiracies that I believe exist I think and everyone. I believe actually that everybody who in the United States is a conspiracy theorist in some sense or another. Virtually everybody, not people in comas. We can exempt them from many things, yes. I mean the fact is there's part of human psychology is that I mean on the one hand we are a storytelling pattern-seeking creature and we need to find a way to sort of fill in the gaps with conjecture. And the second basic part of human existence is that we have things to be afraid of. I mean sometimes they're well grounded fears and sometimes they're completely absurd but fear is part of human psychology. So if you put our capacity for finding patterns together with our capacity for fear and then you add in the fact that sometimes conspiracies do exist. Sometimes you have something like the church committee or more recently the NSA revelations from snowmen. MK Ultra. Yeah, sometimes there's something genuinely in the... So some conspiracies exist. It's not like you keep waiting for vampires to show up. You know, you eventually realize the vampire stories you're telling might not have any truth to them. But periodically conspiracies show up. So you put those three things together. We find patterns. We're afraid of things and sometimes there's a real conspiracy. People will imagine conspiracies. I've certainly imagined conspiracies of different kinds. I mean I think that micro conspiracies clearly exist. I mean people around Washington get together in private to plot things. Sort of the big picture conspiracies are almost always untrue. But you know sometimes a large scale of the thing like MK Ultra does turn out to be... I mean the thing about conspiracies in real life is that on one hand conspiring as part of the human condition people meet sometimes in secret to accomplish things. But on the other part of the human condition is failure. I think the vast majority of plots do not actually work out. And this is true on the big level too. Like the history of the CIA is filled with complete failures. I mean part of the exposés of the 1970s were all those assassination plots against Fidel Castro. And part of that story is every single one of them failed sometimes in just comically incompetent ways. So there's part of the discourse around conspiracy theory often has to do with just could a group really pull that off. You're imagining something that couldn't happen. And sometimes you have to ask yourself, well no, could a group think it could pull something off? Whether or not it would actually... And I'm sure that... I mean you mentioned the CIA because I said that earlier. But you look at other forms of conspiracies that have existed in the real world. You know, Soviet espionage, that sort of thing. Again, it's full of failure as well as successes. And that's the sort of thing that's often left out of the discourse of quote unquote conspiracy theorists because you're not afraid your enemy is going to screw up. You're afraid they're going to succeed. Can we give a definition of conspiracy theory that ropes it off from, say, just plots or schemes or whatever else might not quite fit in there? Yes. I use a very broad definition in this book because when people try to narrow it down and I've seen lots of attempts, you know, serious scholars trying to say, what precisely are we looking at? This often comes up, you know, when you have psychology studies of trying to like find a conspiracy theorizing personality type or something like that. And they add all these qualifications that to me don't belong there. And it's a... Rather than sort of roping things off from conspiracy theories, I think it's better to make distinctions among conspiracy theories. You know, you could say small or large, plausible or implausible. I will get into some of the distinctions in the book that I get into about, you know, outside or inside, which direction it's coming from. But to me, if you've got one or more person being alleged to... I mean, sorry, not more. If you've got more than one person alleged to be acting in secret towards at some sort of end, that you're talking about a conspiracy. Now, if it's a conspiracy to go out and get lunch, who cares, right? But I try to do this sort of very broad definition for a few reasons. One is that one of the categories of conspiracy that I talk about here is the idea of the benevolent conspiracy. And that gets left out a lot because people put in this stricture of they've got to be plotting to do something evil or illegal or... But I think that, you know, these idea of benevolent conspiracies actually influence a lot of the evolution of other conspiracy theories. They're part of the picture that you should be looking at. And another reason is that one of the main theses of this book is that conspiracy theorizing is mainstream, not just in the sense that lots of Americans believe a conspiracy killed JFK, but in the sense that there are lots of beliefs that are not categorized as a conspiracy theory while they're popular, that are in fact conspiracy theories that have the same sort of patterns as the ones that go on on the far left or the far right, you know, the fringes. And when you look at them after they're over, people say, oh, yes, the satanic panic of the 1980s and 90s, for example, that was a conspiracy panic. But that was very mainstream at the time. You had, you know, politicians, prosecutors, juries, mass media outlets embracing this story that nowadays sounds like some of the fringiest Christian right ideas that are around. And so and that's, I mean, there's certainly things that go on around the discourse around terrorism, around cults, around gangs, that really should be thought of as conspiracy theories, but usually aren't because so many people embrace them. Now, the difference, that's a distinction you draw between because your book is called United States of Paranoia. And if people have heard about someone who wrote about Paranoia before famously as Richard Hofstadter in the 50s, now he had a theory that was about a kind of conspiracy theory and who tends to hold them in the 50s. What's the difference between what he wrote about it and your thesis? Yes, Richard Hofstadter. And he started writing about the conservative movement in the 50s. His actual, his article came out in the early 60s. Actually, interestingly, it began as a lecture that was delivered in London on the day before the Kennedy assassination, which almost feels like a conspiracy right there. But he thought he saw this as something of minority movements. I mean, not as in like ethnic minorities, but as in, you know, groups on, you know, the sides of society that might flare up from time to time, but that it's generally not a mainstream phenomenon. And I think that not only does it apply to the mainstream, but you can see it applying to the Richard Hofstadter audience. I mean, his essay when it was published in the wake of the assassination, 1964 in Harper's, and then an expanded version in a book in 65, in the wake of the assassination, I mean, sort of building towards the assassination, then even more so after that, there was an ongoing panic in the United States about the radical right, the second brown scare. And a lot of what Hofstadter wrote about the psychology of people who believe in the Illuminati conspiracy of the 1790s or what have you, I think applies to the folks who were believing this exaggerated stories of a far right subversive threat. And it applied to his audience in ways that are more clear now than they were then, but which it's useful to look at the ways in which, you know, the people were making this critique without thinking about how it might apply to themselves, too. Do conspiracy theories say, well, this is one of the big question, I guess, of this entire episode, but maybe we have to go through the list of conspiracy theories that you have in terms of, because you write about this in the book that you're not interested in whether or not they're true. Yeah. I mean, I'm interested, but that's not the heart of the book, right? But it's about what they say about us in particular in the believers and what they say about us. So maybe we can start going through some of these and you can fill us in on some of your favorite instances. I have some mine in my question notes. So these are the five archetypes. The five archetypes. So the first one is the enemy outside. Right. And the enemy outside is the conspiracy that's based outside the community's gates. It's out there trying to get in and to transform your own community or society into something more like it. And the classic example in American history, I mean, like the first primal example would be the fear of Native American conspiracies that the colonists had. Now, obviously there were actual sometimes Native American plots to attack. They just as there were plots against Native Americans by colonists. But there became also very, there are also a lot of imagined ones that probably did not exist. And then there were some very elaborate apocalyptic ideas about Satan himself being out there in the wilderness and the Indians worshiping him and him directing their plots and maybe coordinating with, you know, other, I mean, it actually kind of coincides with something which falls under a different category, which is the Salem witch trials. So that's the classic example, but it also manifests itself, you know, in terms of fears of the Catholic church, you know, being run from the Vatican, you know, the fear, you know, a lot of Cold War fears of communism. Again, there were spies and so forth, but there were very elaborate additional theories of communist plots that were not true. It continues today in the war on terror, particularly when something like Al Qaeda is imagined as a centralized conspiracy and octopus with tentacles everywhere. Yeah, that one, that one in your book, that was my, one of my big like aha moments was you call, I think you called it the myth of the great chief. The super chief. The super chief. There were Indians, Native Americans who were rallying all the Indians together. Yes, I mean, and this was an idea I borrowed from another historian who had sort of pointed to people like, you know, Geronimo and King Philip's War, King Philip, who was not really a king, but you know, they called, who were sort of imagined as having much more control than they actually, you know, did in fact have over these attacks and so on. And sort of taking the, particularly in the colonial era, there was a tendency to project the European structures onto the Indians so that a sort of decentralized network of villages were imagined as an empire and one influential Indian as the sort of all powerful, you know, plotter behind everything. But, you know, that sort of continues throughout the 19th century, sitting bull and other figures like that. And, you know, that continues in the war on terror too. I mean, there are al-Qaeda, you know, franchises, you know, the thing about al-Qaeda was there are times when it was centralized and there are times when it had, you know, it's fingers in all sorts of different parts of the world, but these tended not to be at the same time, you know, like they tend to, they had their screw ups and everything, same as any other, but there was this tendency to imagine bin Laden as the super chief who was behind everything and if you get rid of him, then you could, you know, cut off the snake's head and everything ends. This projection of us onto them was one of the things that struck me, particularly about the Indian-related conspiracy theory at the beginning, was that there was a symmetry to it because the fear that the colonists had was we've got our settlements and there's these outsiders who are trying to come in, destroy what we've got, force, you know, disrupt our way of life. They're being led or manipulated by a God that is not ours. And if people slip away from the pure and way of life, they will be Indianized and transformed into... Right, which is precisely what the settlers were doing to the Indians. And so I'm back of my undergraduate English days talking about Orientalism and projecting the things on to an other that you fear just like about yourself, and so does that sort of symmetry play out elsewhere? Is that a theme that runs through it? Yeah, and in fact, one theme of the, or I still call it a theme, one sort of recurring motif is moments when you have, and this doesn't just apply to enemy outside stories, two groups looking at one another with paranoid conspiracy theories about one another. And it's, I mean, in that, I mean, in the American Revolution, you had the colonists and the redcoats and the Brits, you know, having their conspiracy theories about one another and they lead up to the Civil War, you had on the one hand northern fears of the slave power, which did not, the slave power did not always, that phrase did not always apply to conspiracy theories, but it often led to very elaborate ideas about a conspiracy of slave holders engaging in assassinations and so on. And on the flip side, Southerners who are constantly afraid of slave conspiracies were seeing a northern hand behind a lot of them. Well, you do write about that in the very beginning of your book. You mentioned the assassination attempt on Andrew Jackson, of which the gun misfired twice, but there was 20 years of conspiracy theories behind that in terms of what you were saying, I think, for the slave power. Yeah, I mean, then people would cite that as one of their blows against, you know, in that case, of course, and one thing I talk about in the book is this sort of burst of conspiracy theorizing. I mean, Jackson himself thought that, you know, the senator that he was, you know, at odds with was behind it. The guy who pulled his gun out and it was, remember correctly, he shot once, it didn't work, and he pulled another gun out. Yeah, and it also – and it was point blank. And that led some people who were anti-Jackson to say, I mean, I don't think the phrase false flag attack existed back then, but that's what they were accusing him of. They said that Jackson must have hired this guy himself in order to – Make himself feel strong. You know, and have the sympathy for himself. Or this guy just needs a different gun dealer. I think might be a better – and this was like a great story in all sorts of ways because Jackson, you know, they didn't have the secret servicemen. Jackson himself subdued the guy after both of his guns. Oh, really? Yeah. And he had his cane, you know, and these people helping him. So, yeah, it is another example. And the connection here, you mentioned the – with the Native American myths or the conspiracy theories and the painting, there's also come with the captivity stories of women getting captured by – especially women. Yeah, not always women. Yeah. And you mentioned that even with the Catholics, they had captivity stories that the Catholics were going to come and kidnap people and take them away to the Vatican and all these kinds. Well, yeah, well, there was this idea that people were held against their will and nunneries, you know, and there were actually some times. And this actually happened with, you know, shakers and some of the other minority religious persuasions that people had conspiracy fears of. You would have raiding groups to quote-unquote liberate people, you know, from the collectors of this cult, you know, and then some people then want to go back to where they were quite happy, you know. Like little big man. Does that bleed into then the next one, the enemy within? Because now you're corrupting people. No. And now those people might come back. Yeah. So, if the enemy outside is the conspiracy based outside, the community skates and alien conspiracy, then the enemy within is the conspirators distinguished by the fact that you can't easily distinguish him or himself. That anyone could be a plotter. The great pop culture example is, you know, invasion of the body snatchers. Which, you know, it's a, you may say, technically, it's the enemy outside because they're from the outer space. But it's the basic animating fears is that the person next door or even someone in your own family might in fact be not who they say they are or working for some other force. And this, of course, is, Salem is the classic example of this. Not only could anyone be a witch, but anyone could be converted to a witch. You could be tormented and then, like, you agree they'll stop tormenting you if you sign the book. And then you've signed Satan's book and you're a part of the plot. And so it's a, and then how can you avoid execution? Well, my denouncing someone else. You know, finding someone so in terms of, like, the creation, the sort of social construction of the conspiracy that allegedly exists, you know, that also tends to spread in this way. And that sort of, that kind of fits witchcraft accusations in general, but part of what separates Salem and distinguishes it from, you know, the sort of general witchcraft accusations that sometimes happened is that it grew out of control. I mean, under the standard procedures in the New England courts in the 17th century, someone could accuse someone else of being behind their cow's illness or something like that, but this is difficult to prove in court, right? I mean, people believed in witchcraft, but they had, you know, some sort of a working tort system. So, and the tendency of the authorities was to not want this kind of thing to be constantly going on, but with the Salem, with what happened in Salem in the 1690s, there was this, well, one thing was the sort of fear of subversion. I mean, this was coming, you know, in the wake of another Indian war and the fractured society. But you had, and so the state actually sort of got into the business of pointing its fingers and making it much easier, and then it kind of got out of their control and you started having prominent people being accused and the wives of prominent people, and that's when you start having some second thoughts coming into the minds of some of the prominent Puritans who had previously been cheering this on. And this is another thing where you can see kind of parallels with more recent things. I mean, the, if you look, I mentioned earlier the satanic panic of the 80s and early 90s and part of, and actually beyond larger than that, a sort of a tendency to see child abuse often where there wasn't good evidence for it. And then one person who had as a prosecutor down in Florida participated in this was one Janet Reno, who then comes up to become attorney general in Washington, D.C., those fears sort of helped feed, you know, her poor decision making, you know, during the Waco raid because she thought, she was told that children were being abused at the Mount Carmel compound. But also then the idea of the satanic conspiracy, meanwhile, had leaked into the fringes so that some of the people who were, you know, trying to claim there really were tunnels at the McMartin Day Care Center and that they're trying to keep those stories alive. You mean these stories of like these day care centers where apparently they would have satanic rituals and abuse these kids. So yeah, we're also, you know, aiming these accusations at who, you know, Janet Reno. So it's very interesting to watch the way these stories leak into new social contexts or cultural contexts where they're then adapted sometimes to very different uses. And that's part of how these archetypal stories, I guess we've talked about two of them that will kind of evolve is that one group gets its hands on it, but their needs for that story are different. So the scaffolding, the basic sort of framework of the story may say the same, but the villain's identity and or goals could change. Now the red scare, of course, can be of the crucible is actually, you know, Arthur Miller is the crucible being a direct parallel, but that would be a classic one and you talk about one of my favorite movies for, especially because you mentioned Evasion of the Body Snatchers and one of the things here is that that was the kind of movie where both the left and the right could say it was about the other side. Right. And then the Manchurian candidate is another one and that's a little different because we had the old one, which is a communist one, but we also have a new one, which is a corporate one. And so then again, like this idea is not nearly as memorable as the one that came out, I saw it and I wrote a scathing review and I don't remember a whole lot of it now. But yeah, and the original novel, the Manchurian candidate, which came out in the 50s by Richard Condon. I mean, there's a number since the man, it's clear Richard Condon despised both Communism and McCarthyism, but it's also clear that what really got under his skin was manipulation. I mean, he had worked in public relations or advertising and forgetting which one, something like that. And that whole sort of approach to seeing your fellow man, what he was sort of going after in this, and then putting it into other skin, and that in itself, it was one of the sort of conspiracy stories of the day. I mean, like the idea of advertisers being able to brainwash people. That's like they live. Yeah. Well, they live, you know, one of the great sort of, not exactly body snatchers, but body imposter movies. Yes, absolutely. So we talk about like the Salem Witch Trials or the satanic panic of the 80s, which are runaway conspiracy theories that then ended. So what is the aftermath of these things look like? I mean, these are, you know, kind of stereotypical view of like the conspiracy theorist is the person who's, you know, got the dark apartment covered in papers and strings and notes. And no matter what happens, everything feeds in and they don't really kind of break out of this. So the people who were pushing the Salem Witch Trials, say, were behind the panic or the people who were saying that the daycare centers had tunnels full of Satanists. When that ends, do they... Repent. Do they repent? Do they say like, I was a conspiracy theorist and I'm sorry and it was fake or how do these things fade out? What does that look like? It looks, I mean, in different ways. I mean, in the case of Salem, that basically ended witchcraft prosecutions in North America, I mean, in what is now the United States. I mean, you can point to incidents here and there, but there was a real backlash against that and there was a formal apology. And I should say, I mean, as bad as that was, America's record and this is way better than Europe's, you know, I mean, that was basically a case of America suddenly looking like what happened, you know, alarmingly frequently in, you know, Scotland and even more so in the parts of the continent. So there's that and there's other times when people just sort of have a forgetting, you know, you forgot that this thing happened. The, when I mentioned the satanic panic as an example, people will say, oh, I mean, unless they're really young and don't remember it, people will say, oh, yeah, that's a good example. That was kind of crazy, but that's not something people, I mean, unless they have a loved one who's still in jail, that's not something that people usually think about and people may vaguely remember sort of, oh, yeah, people got kind of upset about heavy metal bands in the 80s, you know, but it's not something that when we talk about the history of the 1980s, it's not usually one of the first things people mentioned, even though it was a pretty big part of American culture at the time. I mean, it's and one that left a real mark. Dungeons and Dragons, too, I think was about the time that got implicated in the sense. Well, I mean, there was, Tipper Gore wrote a book called, jeez, I think it was like raising PG kids in an R society or something like that. And she had a whole section on, I mean, of course, Tipper Gore is infamous for the PMRC, like for the whole, the fear of the... Perpetual advisory. Right, what was going on in popular music, but she had a whole section on role-playing games and she used, as a big source, like this group called it, bothered about Dungeons and Dragons, accusing it of I think this occultist, these occultist elements, and it's a, and just basically just mindlessly repeating with this very nutty group had was saying. And this is just, I mean, this was not a book that was sort of treated as like, the way we would think of something coming from Pat Robertson, you know, I mean, lots of, you know, sort of culturally hit people didn't like Tipper Gore because of, you know, they remembered, you know, the hearings with Frank Zappa and so on, you're challenging her. But the fact, this sort of became kind of the mainstream suburban center-left fear of popular culture. I mean, this book was sort of, the sort of part of the moment that people worried about violent video games and so on. And it's, I think I'd have to check Hillary Clinton might have, you know, blurbed it or praised it or something. I, and it's, I mean, it was certainly of the, the kind of the part of American life that Hillary Clinton represents, you know, in the culture wars. And the fact that it contains this stuff that's, you know, sheer vintage 80s satanic panic is pretty interesting. Actually, I'm speaking of the parent, the record label thing. I remember the end of the push for having an O label for stuff with the occult. Oh really? Yeah, yeah. So all the black Sabbath albums would have to be, and that's of course all Timbermore really needed was to listen to the first four black Sabbath albums and she would be cured of what ails her. I want to move on to the third one, the enemy above. Right, so now the next two, I say the enemy above and the enemy below, people might sort of recognize there's kind of a directional thing going on. So the enemy above is what people tend to think of when they hear the phrase conspiracy theory. Sometimes mixed with some enemy outside stuff. But any sort of conspiracy theory that involves say the CIA is enemy above. It's sort of powerful institutions, government, large corporations, you know, the dominant institutions in society. If it's located in one of those or in some sort of secret society that's allegedly pulling the strings or trying to seize power, then it's an enemy above theory. Do you have any particular favorite ones of those that are quite common? Well, I mean, I mentioned, I mean, again, anything with the CIA. Yeah, I mean, so anything with the CIA, so also would you consider DaVinci code kind of stuff? Well, DaVinci. Let me, Rosicrucians or Lumen, I mean. Well, actually. Mason, that's what I mean, like Mason. Let's hold off on Rosicrucians. Okay, they're actually, they kind of fit into category five except then there's the other, well, we'll get to that. But my favorite enemy above conspiracy theory is a little known tract called the Declaration of Independence. And in this conspiracy track that it not only lists all the things that the King of England is doing to the colonists but says that it is a design aimed at reducing them to slavery. I mean, it's very clearly conspiratorial language and this is of a piece with a lot of the rhetoric in speeches, pamphlets, correspondence of the American colonists and the lead up to and during the American Revolution. George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, all these people spoke in conspiratorial terms about what the British were doing to them. That seems to be the kind of one we got for, I mean, I feel like the 90s were kind of with the X-Files and the alien stuff, there was a lot of enemy above kind of conspiracies going on. Yeah, I think so. You do talk a little bit about aliens in the book and when they factor in a different, I mean sometimes with the enemy above and conspiracies with the CIA and things like this and you also have the body snatchers but I guess I'd be skipping ahead to the benevolent conspiracy of aliens. Well, should I say something about the enemy below? I mean, if the enemy above is the conspiracy of the people who rule, the enemy below is the conspiracy of those at the bottom of the social ladder trying to subvert and overturn it. The classic examples were the Southern Planners fear of slave conspiracies. I mean, some people could not see two slaves talking without worrying that they were plotting a rebellion. You look, there are, if you look back at the history of slave rebellions in the South, there are a lot more suppressions of slave rebellions than there are actual slave rebellions because there are a lot of false positives and in fact, some things we're not even quite sure if there really was a slave rebellion or not because we're dependent upon the records kept by this deeply biased judicial system that the slaveocracy had in place. But I mean, of course, there are other contexts too. Actually, when we were talking about these sort of changing forms slightly in different cultural contexts, some of the stories told about the slave rebellion or the alleged slave conspiracies in the antebellum era are practically identical to conspiracy stories that were told about the riots in the ghettos in the 1960s. And then you look them back to back and I get into this in the book. I mean, it's clear that this is a story structure that really filled a need. How does that structure go? It's a, there is at the core of it this fear of, there's a tendency among white racists to imagine blacks as subhuman, particularly when acting together and sort of imagine them as this zombie mob that's going to rape and loot and burn. But zombie is an interesting phrase because I just described sort of the modern zombie thing which is not a conspiracy fear, more of like a fear of like appetites on autopilot. But the old zombie stories, they're the mesmerized slaves of a master and often you had enemy below stories combined with enemy outside or even in some sort of odd cases, enemy above stories because you have suspicions of other parts of the United States. And so you would have abolition, people imagining that abolitionists were behind it because they saw all these white abolitionists are directing this either because they think blacks were too stupid to figure out how to conspire or too happy with their lot, if not, like to this. Also with land pirates, there are other versions of it. And then in the 1960s, you would have some of very similar narratives about what the looters and so forth were gonna do and what they were being promised by communist conspirators, by LBJ thought that communist conspirators, we're not just saying that the John Birch Society here. Lyndon Johnson was pressing his attorney general and the FBI to come up with evidence that the communist bloc was behind the riot. And so it's, not only is there these sort of parallels of the broad structures of the stories, but even sort of elements of, I mean some of the sexual fears, people were being, rebellious slaves were being promised white women for their. That's a constant theme in American history. And it's not just like the constant sort of fear of the black man raping the white woman, which is again a big part of American racist folklore, but this idea of it being promised as a reward, this is gonna be part of your loot when we've overturned it. And actually I mentioned sort of the enemy outside being put in there. This is one of the things that people just forget or don't think about because it's so bizarre to conceive of. But in the South in the 1940s, there were rumors that there were these black clubs that were plotting rebellion that were in league with Hitler, so-called swastika clubs. And that Hitler had promised the black southerners control of the South after he won World War II. Now we know about Hitler. It's impossible. Yeah, it's impossible, but it's mildly. But this was a rumor in the South in early 1940s. And there was another version where the enemy outside was Japan. There was another version where it was Eleanor Roosevelt. So- Curious about the role that these either categories or archetypes play in conspiracy theorizing. So is this, these five categories was this like, so there's a whole bunch of conspiracy theories and here's a way to divide them up? Or is there something powerful, like medically powerful about these five archetypes, such that they kind of draw conspiracies to them so that we have some sort of conspiracy gets going and then it coalesces towards one of these things? And this kind of becomes clear that I was just saying in terms of combining the enemy below and enemy outside. There are all sorts of overlaps and crossbreeding. I mean, this is sort of an, and I'm very explicit about this in the book. I mean, this is sort of a way of organizing on the topic. I think that there are stories that kind of attract new suspicions to them. I mean, stories within these archetypes, as I was just describing, you know, like with the riot theories resembling the old slave conspiracy theories. But it's not that there's this natural tendency towards purity. Like if you've got a mixture of enemy below and enemy outside, it will naturally gravitate towards one or the other. I don't think it works that way at all. And I think that, although I do think that there are certain sorts of stories that are more likely to be paired. And also, sometimes a story will shift from one archetype to another over time as suspicions change. So you had the John Birch Society in the 1950s having an enemy outside story about communism. And even when you have suspicions that Eisenhower is part of it, you know, I mean, the High Quarters are in Moscow. And this becomes an enemy above story in the 60s. It becomes the idea that, no, the communists are actually serving, you know, sort of corporate masters based in the United States. And that's the actual heart of the conspiracy. And then, and then it'll also work in the idea that people who were rebelling in the 1960s, you know, the student protestors, black protestors and so on, their strings are being pulled not by, I mean, either indirectly through the communists or, you know, directly through other means by the sort of enemy above. So you have enemy above, enemy outside, enemy below all working together in the storyline. But whether it's at its core an enemy outside story or an enemy above story changes. So these things mutate and develop constantly. And it's, I've sort of created this organizing principle for, you know, discussing it. But it's a, it's, oh, what's the phrase? It's- Ad hoc taxonomy to some extent. I wouldn't say it's ad hoc. Or I would say- Imperfect taxonomy. I would say it's really, I try to be very clear that I'm not discovering something in nature here. I'm like creating a way to understand it. There are other legitimate ways of looking at it too. Now the fifth one is, we mentioned benevolent conspiracy which we mentioned with the Rosicrucians. And also the one with the aliens and- Angels. Angels or aliens coming in to fix our environment with the government. All these kind of ones, can you tell us a little about this? Yeah, and this is also another case of where these things can mutate because there are texts, you know, sort of new age books that I imagine is that, you know, say that there's America has a hidden destiny, you know, and the Rosicrucians or the angels or whoever are guiding us. And there are then Christian right people who will, you know, take this and say, this is, you know, this is the evil conspiracy. Here we have the confessions of the people involved with it. Or, you know, people who would look at some of the more heterodox stories about angels and say those are really devils, you know. But the heart of the benevolent conspiracy is the idea that, you know, when people say things like, everything happens for a reason, they are not necessarily saying that's because the Illuminati is subverting everything. They're talking about sort of a hidden benevolent hand moving things. And in sort of a classic American version, you're someone's talking about God, but there are times when this becomes more than just one supernatural being or not even necessarily supernatural, it can become extraterrestrial. And that's what this whole idea of sort of like a benevolent invisible college and in that chapter looks at the history of that concept. So in general, do you, we've been talking about what we can learn about these, but I guess I'm sort of recapitulating to say, conspiracy theories are everywhere. They're constantly at play in American politics. And if that's true actually, what about libertarian conspiracy theories? Oh, sure, yeah. I mean, the question is, people have asked me, you know, are libertarians more likely or less likely to believe in conspiracy theories? And to me, it's more the question of libertarian conspiracy theories are much more likely to feature the state because that's who libertarians don't like, you know, or other institutions in collaboration with the state, using the state, you know? So I, and people say are libertarians more likely to believe in conspiracy theories? Well, they're more likely to believe in anti-government ones and less likely to believe the ones being promoted by the government. I guess that's true, but you also see the libertarians who do believe 9-11 conspiracy theories. I mean, I guess that would be the government doing that. Yeah, yeah. I mean, again. It depends on those lines and the preppers and whatnot. Is there a way to recognize a conspiracy theory when we come to it or to take this history and use it to protect ourselves against falling prey to believing in the ones that are gonna look pretty silly in 20 years? Yeah, I think if you know the history, I mean, first of all, if a story sounds really familiar, everyone must read this book so that they will know the telltale signs of a false conspiracy theory. Yeah, I mean, if something really sounds like one of those old Indian conspiracy theories, you know, or like the witch hunt conspiracy theories, that's a sign that even if there's a grain of truth there, perhaps they're being organized into a narrative that's misleading. So that, for example, obviously terrorists were plotting against Americans on 9-11, right? Obviously, Osama bin Laden is a party to that. Some people would deny that. I think the case for it's pretty strong, but that doesn't mean we should conceive of those conspirators or of terrorists in this sort of super-chief way, and that can lead to just misjudging the situation you're in. And again, the things like the satanic pan, I mean, if you look at a lot of the rhetoric nowadays around human trafficking, especially sex trafficking, I think that there's this tendency, again, to imagine these criminal enterprises as these sort of vast and very powerful and centralized institutions in ways that, it's very reminiscent of the satanic panic. And I think if nothing else, if you get that twinge of familiarity, that's not gonna tell you whether or not any particular person is being trafficked, but it's going to help you understand like maybe where you should ask further questions. Is there a process to, I mean, some of these, so now we have the internet or we've had it for a while, but compared to most of what your book talks about, we didn't have the internet then. So some of these seem like they could just be developed so that the satanic panic or the human trafficking stuff could just develop through one group makes a claim, it gets reported by a media outlet without properly vetting their source, and then those people make the claim, and then now people think that a whole bunch of people make the claim, means it's probably true, and then ABC News reports it, and so you could have this, this is just the process of trying to get something to be a big enough panic that the people who want to change laws about it, like the fundamental Christians who started the satanic panic, that they have to use this strategy to get people to talk about it so they can actually do something about it, so they're trying to sort of show up. So you're having a conspiracy theory about the spread of conspiracy theories. No, no, no, I'm just saying there's just, they're just like the one group, like whether it's Jerry Falwell's group, they want to gin up panic about this, and they succeed in doing it. Yeah, I mean, I don't think that the satanic panic emerged. I mean, I think that in that case you had the collision of several anxieties that happened to happen at the same time, a fear of, a fear it's about missing children, fears of cults, yeah, there was a movement to sort of, I mean, for a lot of time, child abuse had been swept under the rug, and there was this sort of overcorrection where people were sort of thinking, now we must always believe anything that comes out of the mouth of a child, even if they've just been in a long session with a sketchy psychotherapist, you know, who's been, you know, so it's a, you know, and there were a number of sexual anxieties going on at the same time, so I don't think that someone deliberately cooked up the satanic panic in order to advance an agenda. I think it, but I think that it then happened at a time where stories that were being told in a sort of fringy Christian context a decade earlier were now being embraced by the mainstream, and often not even by people who knew that a decade earlier, someone had been making these claims in this other context. So looking at our world today, are there things except as conventional wisdom right now or at least not dismissed as conspiracy theories that you think stand a good chance of being seen as them later? Yeah, I mentioned the sex trafficking, I think a lot of that is gonna be, is gonna be looked back in with embarrassment now. I mean, we're having kind of a rerun right now of a lot of the white slavery stories that were told about coerced prostitution a century ago. And it's actually now we're at this point where even though, I, even people who are susceptible to believing some of the more odd and exaggerated claims about sex trafficking right now are, they would look back at the white slavery stuff as well. Of course that stuff was nuts because it was done in this language of the progressive era and earlier, but I think that's one example. And then broader, I mean, I don't know how long, whether this is something that we'll ever sort of recover from, but all of our discourses around minority religions and what I get like it called cults often fall into this. A lot of our discourse around gangs, I mentioned that earlier, but it's important to all sorts of crime stories, people imagine things being organized. I mean, stuff that gets forwarded to you about the secret symbol, I mean gang initiations and so there's this sort of very pulpy imagination that gets imposed on obviously crime is real and gangs are real, but they don't all look like this movie that you saw when you were 17 or whatever. But that's been so current. I don't know if we'll ever get past it. And then with terrorism, I don't think fear of terrorism itself is going to go away because terrorism is going to, but there's always gonna be some sorts of terrorism, but I think that some of the more specific fears that are going through the American culture right now may be viewed in the future the way we now look back at the stories told about Japanese Americans during World War II, that sort of thing. So is there any indication that conspiracy theories might be getting worse? One reason I think they maybe could be, for example, is that we're walling ourselves off in different media outlets, so we might need conspiracy theories to explain the other side because we rarely interact with it, for example. Just the internet in general, are they getting more common, are they getting worse? Things gonna, is this a problem if that's true? I think there's actually a really interesting study that was done recently, Joe Yusinski and Joe Perrand, a couple of political scientists, took this enormous sample of letters from the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, mostly the New York Times, but they used the Tribune sort of as a control group to make sure that they weren't getting something that was just like the liberal times audience, or relatively liberal coastal times audience. And they, going back more than a century, and they just basically looked at all the letters to the editor and coded, you know, like which ones made conspiratorial claims. And it was, there were a couple of really big spikes in the 1890s around the people talking about corporate trusts in the 1950s, Cold War communist fears. And there's some smaller spikes around things like Watergate, but over time, basically, it tended to be pretty constant and actually slightly declining. Now, there are obvious follow-up questions, like, you know, to what extent did things then move to talk radio or the internet and so forth. But this is like the most complete sort of study that I've seen someone do, and it reinforces my general gut feeling, which is that, no, it's not more common now. The internet has changed the way conspiracy theories are generated and spread. I think, you know, the conspiracy news cycle has sped up along with all the rest of the news cycle. I think that it's now a lot of conspiracy theories that previously would be limited to particular subcultures are now much more visible to outsiders, so that when I mentioned, you know, the Swastika Club story earlier, we know about that because the sociologists went on and interviewed a bunch of people. But now you can watch things get posted on Facebook page. And not only does that make it more visible, but it also means there's more cross-pollination. You might have a conspiracy forum where people who probably would not talk about this in real life might encounter and trade stories. And so you have, you know, hippies, black nationalists, UFO buffs, militiamen, you know, taking what they want from other people's stories and working. So this all changes the way conspiracy stories are told, but it doesn't necessarily make them more common. And when you also add in the fact that yes, conspiracy stories can travel quickly and far on the internet, so can debunking. It's not immediately obvious. I mentioned Joe Yusinski, he actually thinks that debunking might be winning that particular race. He's writing a paper, it's not out yet, I don't know. But I mean, it's not immediately obvious that one is gonna pull ahead of the other. So what we have now is not so much like a new paranoid era as this is the particular paranoia of 2016. Most people have not looked at this history and most people tend to forget the things that they found quite compelling, you know, 15, 25, 35 years earlier. So they forget, you know, or they don't know about it or they just sort of pass over the fears of earlier eras that people have always had things to be afraid of and I imagine they always will. Thank you for listening. Free Thoughts is produced by Evan Banks and Mark McDaniel. To learn more, find us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.