![]() This book, written by a leading expert on the subject, is the most comprehensive and authoritative examination of contemporary American conspiracism to date. Unraveling the extraordinary genealogies and permutations of these increasingly widespread ideas, Barkun shows how this web of urban legends has spread among subcultures on the Internet and through mass media, how a new style of conspiracy thinking has recently arisen, and how this phenomenon relates to larger changes in American culture. What is far less known is the extent to which conspiracist worldviews have recently become linked in strange and unpredictable ways with other "fringe" notions such as a belief in UFOs, Nostradamus, and the Illuminati. The Kennedy assassination, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the 2001 terrorist attacks have all generated elaborate stories of hidden plots. It is well known that some Americans are obsessed with conspiracies. What do UFO believers, Christian millennialists, and right-wing conspiracy theorists have in common? According to Michael Barkun in this fascinating yet disturbing book, quite a lot. In this revised and expanded edition, Michael Barkun delves deeper into America's conspiracy sub-culture, exploring the rise of 9/11 conspiracy theories, the "birther" controversy surrounding Barack Obama's American citizenship, and how the conspiracy landscape has changed with the rise of the Internet and other new media. Pegram and The New Hate: A History of Fear and Loathing on the Populist Right by Arthur Goldwag, the authors make the point that hate groups and the conspiracy theories that circulate within them are deeply rooted in American culture and that, while they are, in the details, constructions of their own times, they are also responses to problems seen as long-standing threats to American security and prosperity, responses that are consistent across time.Īmerican society has changed dramatically since A Culture of Conspiracy was first published in 2001. In both One Hundred Percent American: The Rebirth and Decline of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s by Thomas R. While these structural changes might feel painful for those native-born white Americans who view signs of increasing pluralism as worrisome and who believe that their economic losses are due to the gains of minority groups, they are not new challengesnor are the hate-filled responses to them new. As reported by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the number of hate groups in the United States has continually risen since 2000 in response to three factors: the election of the nations first African American president, economic turmoil, and undocumented immigration (Potok, 2011). ![]()
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