Conjure up money series#
In addition to describing the theories, their origins and the reality of the situation, we take on some of the chief enablers of these destructive tall tales.ġ. Common Core - The Plot Against Our ChildrenĮver since the Supreme Court ruled in 1948 that outside groups like churches couldn’t provide religious instruction in public schools - the first of a series of court decisions meant to ensure such schools would be genuinely secular - far-right forces in America have increasingly rejected the very notion of public education, attacking it as part of an anti-God, socialistic plot to poison our children’s minds. What follows are 10 key conspiracy theories that have made their way from the margins of our society to often shocking levels of acceptance in the political mainstream. As Francis Bacon suggested almost four centuries ago, conspiracy theories are a way for weak minds to deal with a complex world - and to wreck any chance for finding real solutions. When politicians allege a global conspiracy behind a United Nations sustainability plan, preserving the planet becomes even harder.Ĭonspiracy theories, in other words, are destructive to democracy they substitute ignorance and suspicion for knowledge and reason, and make it that much harder to deal with the many problems before us. and Canadian elites were secretly planning to merge the three countries, it helped to derail any hope for enacting comprehensive immigration reform. When hundreds of thousands of Americans swallowed the claim that Mexican, U.S. When Sarah Palin accused the president of organizing “death panels” as part of his health care plan, the debate veered from the serious to the ridiculous. Greg Abbott truly believes that a military exercise this summer was a prelude to martial law, he acted as if he might.
Almost any belief that a person has, no matter how far out or disconnected from the facts, has some kind of “news” source to back it up.īut what may be even more important in the highly polarized political environment of the United States in recent years has been the willingness of large numbers of politicians - either because they really believe or because they are willing to pander shamelessly to the extremists in their bases - to legitimize the fairy tales. One factor fertilizing such beliefs is the proliferation of alternative forms of media, from cable television and talk radio to social media and a seemingly endless number of websites. military exercises in Texas this summer are actually a first step toward martial law and on and on and on. And since Hofstadter’s seminal essay, the list of alleged evildoers has kept on growing, especially on the far right, where global elites are today seen as secretly laboring to build a totalitarian “New World Order.”Īlthough it is difficult to make valid historical comparisons, it is hard to avoid feeling that our country is drowning in an even larger ocean of conspiracy theories now than in decades or centuries past: President Obama is a Kenyan and a Marxist bent on seizing the weapons of all Americans Common Core educational standards are part of a plot to impose communism on the U.S.
What Hofstadter called “movements of suspicious discontent” have targeted imaginary threats ranging from the Illuminati, Freemasons and Jesuits of long ago all the way to the Communist infiltration alleged by Joseph McCarthy and the John Birch Society in the mid-20th century.
The surface of events is never what it appears, but instead hides deep, dark and destructive forces. “There is nothing makes a man suspect much, more than to know little.” FRANCIS BACON, Of Suspicion, 1625Īmerica, as the historian Richard Hofstadter famously noted in 1964, is a place peculiarly given to “the paranoid style” of politics - the idea that history is no accident, but rather the outcome of a series of conspiracies. This article was originally published by The Southern Poverty Law Center.
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