“You can see how crazy things get when you hide power and when you portray the government as an abstract and evil force—corporate propaganda has been a wonderfully profitable investment, but the chickens are coming home to roost.”
There are of course multiple reasons why you see so much unhinged conspiracism in America. One factor is that America has always been off the charts in terms of religious fundamentalism—you can readily observe just how much the conspiracism interacts with religious fundamentalism.
Another factor is that America has always been engaged in attacking people like the Indigenous nations and oppressing people like the Black slaves. That history has naturally led to paranoia about the victims maybe fighting back and maybe getting revenge—the Indigenous nations might fight back and get revenge, the Black slaves might fight back and get revenge, and so on and so forth.
I also think that corporate propaganda is a factor—you can get a sense of the scale of corporate propaganda if you search “corporate propaganda” in the resource that Peter R. Mitchell and John Schoeffel put together, which cites excellent material like Elizabeth Fones-Wolf’s 1992 Selling Free Enterprise and Alex Carey’s 1997 Taking the Risk Out of Democracy. Scholars have failed to study the enormous phenomenon of corporate propaganda adequately—this is one of most important topics in American history and yet there isn’t much scholarship on this at all. Listen from the following timestamp and you’ll hear the emotion in Noam Chomsky’s voice as he describes—at a 1997 seminar—the level of academic neglect:
So there should be vastly more attention given to this topic—corporate propaganda shaped the modern United States and set the stage for the modern GOP, but it’s a marginal topic for academics.
There are two reasons why I think that corporate propaganda—which has been implemented on a staggering scale—has played a role in driving conspiracism. First, corporate propaganda hides power in accordance with the following principle that Samuel Huntington articulates in his 1981 book American Politics:
The coexistence in America of the antipower ethic with inequality in power gives rise to what may be termed the “power paradox”: effective power is unnoticed power; power observed is power devalued. At times Americans have gloried in the conspicuous consumption of wealth, but never in the conspicuous employment of power. The architects of power in the United States must create a force that can be felt but not seen. Power remains strong when it remains in the dark; exposed to the sunlight it begins to evaporate.
So there’s an effort to “create a force that can be felt but not seen”. And that effort drives conspiracism—crazy stuff will fill the void if you hide from public view the mechanisms of actual power. People will try to explain why the world is rotten and why their lives are going so badly—they’ll find insane explanations if you obscure the real ones.
Second, corporate propaganda portrays the government as an abstract and evil force. This is a useful tactic for the corporate sector—the big threat to the corporate sector is that people might take over the government, but people won’t try to take over the government if people view the government as an abstract and evil thing that couldn’t ever reflect the people’s interests. The government is the corporate sector’s weapon—you don’t want the people to see the government as something potentially democratic that could be transformed into the people’s weapon. And it’s natural that this portrayal—of the government as an abstract and evil force—will set people up to believe conspiracist things.
So for these two reasons—(1) corporate propaganda hides power and (2) corporate propaganda portrays the government as an abstract and evil force—I think that the processes that Fones-Wolf and Carey describe have a lot to do with the rise of stuff like this:
And people might not appreciate just how mainstream conspiracism is in 2022. I took some notes on a 3 August 2022 CNN piece that discusses Alex Jones—a radio host who’s apparently made a huge fortune pushing conspiracy theories—and discusses how the derangement isn’t marginal:
“many in the Republican Party and conservative movement increasingly sound like Jones, with talk of false flags, crisis actors and pedophile rings now a mainstay of right-wing rhetoric”—“conspiracy theories have become a core component of conservatism in America”
from “its beginning in the 1940s and 1950s, the modern conservative movement embraced a conspiratorial mindset”—you saw “books that argued former President Franklin Roosevelt allowed the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor to unite Americans behind him in war”, you saw “the anti-fluoridation conspiracies of the John Birch Society”, and you saw “the communist-around-every-corner witch hunts of the McCarthy era”
“with the exception of McCarthyism, the conspiracy-minded right remained distinct from the Republican Party”—that “changed in the 1990s”
Pat Robertson published The New World Order in 1991—the book details “a coalition of the Trilateral Commission, Illuminati, Bilderberg Group, Free Masons and others working to bring about a single global governance and, ultimately, the End Times”
Robertson “ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 1988” but “wasn’t the only Republican presidential candidate warning about the new world order”—it “became a staple of Pat Buchanan’s speeches in all three of his presidential runs between 1992 and 2000”
during “the Clinton years, members of Congress held inquiries into black helicopters (a staple of 1990s conspiracies) and mainlined countless conspiracy theories about Bill and Hillary Clinton”—regarding conspiracy theories, there was also an influence from “the newly powerful right-wing radio of the 1990s and 2000s”
“Glenn Beck’s radio program cycled through conspiracies with breathtaking speed, pinging from Common Core to George Soros to Agenda 21, a United Nations-based conspiracy theory”—in the Obama era, “Beck became one of the most prominent voices in the Tea Party movement and conspiracism ran rampant on the right”
Jones’s “Jade Helm 15 conspiracy of 2015” is an example of a Jones conspiracy that gained “traction in Republican circles”—Jones falsely told his audience that a “routine military exercise in Texas” was “a covert government effort to prepare for martial law”
“Texas Gov. Greg Abbott ordered the state militia to monitor the exercise”—“Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, preparing for a presidential bid, also legitimated the conspiracy”
the “Republican Party spent decades arguing that government was corrupt, if not illegitimate, and grew increasingly reliant on right-wing media for the party’s messaging”—“it took very little effort to tip over into the world of wild conspiracies”
it’s true that “Alex Jones may never speak at a Republican convention or become a part of the Fox News primetime lineup”, but “he doesn’t have to”—his “conspiratorial thinking, rhetoric and style are now well-integrated in the Republican Party, a legacy not only of the Trump years but of decades of conspiratorial politics”
So you can observe the derangement’s acceleration. You can see how crazy things get when you hide power and when you portray the government as an abstract and evil force—corporate propaganda has been a wonderfully profitable investment, but the chickens are coming home to roost.
Speaking of unhinged so called discourse, plus crazy and well organized conspiracies which are moving to create a theocratic please check out a recent essay by Jane Mayer titled State Legislators Are Torching Democracy.
Plus check out the work of Sharon Beder the author of This Little Kiddy Went To Market - The Corporate Capture of Childhood, Global Spin and several other books too.