(1)
so: the core module of u.s. conspiracist thinking is the one it inherited from the european christian intelligentsia, whose history norman cohn traced brilliantly in Europe’s Inner Demons (if a little dryly, especially if you’re not an archive-rat like me). it goes back to ancient roman political maneuvering – in sallust’s account of the “catiline conspiracy”, from the last century before the christian era, for instance – and perhaps even further1, but consolidated itself through anti-jewish and anti-christian attacks over the first few hundred years of the christian era.
that module says:
there is a hidden group of people who seek power for themselves and control over our society; they gather in secret and hold perverse sexual rites, abusing children (and also adults – willing or unwilling – often incestuously); they ritually kill humans (often children, specificially) and drink their blood or eat their flesh; their ultimate goal is to undermine the political and social systems that we live within.
i won’t go into the history of that module (i’d only be summarizing cohn, and you should just read him instead) but it moves essentially unchanged from roman anti-christian polemic through christian anti-heresy and anti-witchcraft polemics and the anti-jewish blood libel, inspiring and excusing a massive number of murders and massacres along the way. almost all of those deaths, importantly, were carried out by the state (whichever one, of whatever form), or with the explicit or implicit support of the state.
we’ve seen a very classical version of this module emerge and grow over the past decade: the ongoing Pizzagate/QAnon movement.
and we’ve seen an equally classical mobilization of it in a more open-ended form over a slightly longer period: the ongoing anti-trans campaigns centered in the u.k. and u.s.
and we have also, over more or less the same years, seen more and more detailed evidence of something else:
the actual involvement of an impressive number of public figures with someone they knew was actively involved with the sexual exploitation of both children and adults on a very large scale, which many of them directly participated in or saw happening.
(2)
one response to that has been “the conspiracy theorists were right”.
it’s a tempting throw-away line, and i can understand why i’m seeing it so often from people in my circles.
but it’s also both untrue and dangerous.
Continue reading files and conspiracies