Preface Preface to the First Edition 1. The Nature of Conspiracy Belief 2. Millennialism, Conspiracy, and Stigmatized Knowledge 3. New World Order Conspiracies I: The New World Order and the Illuminati 4. New World Order Conspiracies II: A World of Black Helicopters 5. UFO Conspiracy Theories, 1975--1990 6. UFOs Meet the New World Order: Jim Keith and David Icke 7. Armageddon Below 8. UFOs and the Search for Scapegoats I: Anti-Catholicism and Anti-Masonry 9. UFOs and the Search for Scapegoats II: Anti-Semitism among the Aliens 10. September 11 Conspiracies: The First Phase 11. September 11 Conspiracies: The Second Phase 12. Conspiracy Theories about Barack Obama 13. Conspiracists and Violence 14. Apocalyptic Expectations about the Year 2012 15. Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index
Michael Barkun, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the Maxwell School, Syracuse University, is author of Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement (revised edition 1997) and Disaster and the Millennium (1986), among other books.
"Scholarly but fluently written and free of excessive jargon,
Barkun’s exploration of the conspiratorial worldview combines
sociological depth with a deadpan appreciation of pop culture and
raises serious questions about the replacement of democracy by
conspiracy as the dominant paradigm of political action in the
public mind."
*Publishers Weekly*
"If Michael Barkun had endeavored only to document and catalogue
wild and untamed strands of American conspiracy beliefs, this book
would have still been a massive and worthy undertaking. Yet Barkun
structures the book not with his impressive and highly readable
intellectual histories of various conspiracy beliefs and their
relationships with one another, but with a basic epistemological
challenge: How do we really know what is true? . . . Culture of
Conspiracy is both a vivid history and wary explanation of why the
strategy of obfuscating the facts of the world with unfalsifiable
rhetoric and fearsome paranoia has always existed to some degree at
both the fringes and the center of our nation's popular
thought."
*Terrorism & Political Violence*
“Like all good works of scholarship, A Culture of Conspiracy raises
questions and invites further research. . . . Ideas, even bizarre
and marginalized ideas, do have consequences, and we ignore them at
our peril. Barkun’s explorations, like the canary in the coal mine,
warn us of what may lie ahead.”
*Christian Century*
"Barkun [is] astonishingly well-grounded in literary, oral, and
media sources, offering many insights into contemporary social
experience. . . . That the beliefs described . . . are bizarre
ought not to imply that they are innocuous or unworthy of careful
observation."
*Western Folklore*
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