The United States of Paranoia

by Jesse Walker

  20. On the intersection between Populism and Theosophy, see Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (Oxford University Press, 2007), 263–65. The preeminent Theosophist in the Populist Party was Ignatius Donnelly of Minnesota, a former congressman who wrote the preamble to the party’s 1892 platform and later ran for vice president on a Populist ticket. He was also the author of speculative books on Atlantis and on Francis Bacon’s alleged authorship of William Shakespeare’s plays.

  21. On Glinka’s relationship to Theosophy and the Protocols, see Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Harper & Row, 1967), 100–2.

  22. William Dudley Pelley, Seven Minutes in Eternity (Kessinger Publishing, 2006 [1929]), 12.

  23. Quoted in Jim Rodgers and Tim Kullman, Facing Terror: The Government’s Response to Contemporary Extremists in America (University Press of America, 2002), 44.

  24. Ferguson did allude in a foggy way to Rosicrucian legend, and that probably didn’t help matters. “At first,” she wrote, Aquarian “traditions were transmitted intimately, by alchemists, Gnostics, cabalists, and hermetics.” Marilyn Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980s (J. P. Tarcher, 1980), 46.

  25. Constance Cumbey, The Hidden Dangers of the Rainbow: The New Age Movement and Our Coming Age of Barbarism (Huntington House, 1983), 61.

  26. Ibid., 53.

  27. Godfré Ray King [Guy Ballard], Unveiled Mysteries (Saint Germain Press, 1934), x.

  28. Ibid., 83. Robert Heinlein borrowed the concept of a Shasta-based Benevolent Conspiracy in his science fiction story “Lost Legacy,” published two years after Ballard’s death. Heinlein gave the idea a libertarian spin: In his tale, the secret order in the mountain is working to protect individual liberty and expand human potential. It is opposed by a Long Island–based psychic cabal that controls “the racketeers, the crooked political figures, the shysters, the dealers in phony religions, the sweat-shoppers, the petty authoritarians.” Robert Heinlein, “Lost Legacy” (1941), in Robert Heinlein, Assignment in Eternity (Baen, 1987 [1953]), 224.

  29. King, Unveiled Mysteries, 43. Pelley of the Silver Shirts also believed that the Benevolent Conspiracy was guiding the United States toward a special destiny, but in his case the idea was soaked in anti-Semitism. The United States, he proclaimed, was to be “a bright and shining light” that “cast a pattern visible to all races as the thing which all mankind can attain.” Before we could get there, though, we would have to defeat the “megalomaniacal Jew.” Quoted in Geoffrey S. Smith, To Save a Nation: American “Extremism,” the New Deal, and the Coming of World War II, 2nd ed. (Ivan R. Dee, 1992), 80.

  30. Quoted in Gerald Bryan, Psychic Dictatorship in America (Truth Research Publications, 1940), 193.

  31. Ibid., 194.

  32. Ibid., 21.

  33. Ibid., 194.

  34. Philip Jenkins has pointed out that the prosecution of the I AM leadership coincided not just with Bell’s and Pelley’s legal problems but with crackdowns on the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Nation of Islam, and various polygamist and snake-handling sects—a multifront war on minority religions that Jenkins calls “the purge of the forties” and that we could classify as an attack on the Enemy Within. See Philip Jenkins, Mystics and Messiahs: Cults and New Religions in American History (Oxford University Press, 2000), 149–60.

  35. “Interestingly,” one historian has pointed out, “Swedenborg visits each planet known to exist in the 1750s on his way beyond the solar system to the starry heavens, but fails to note the existence of Uranus, Neptune, or Pluto.” J. Gordon Melton, “The Contactees: A Survey,” in The Gods Have Landed: New Religions from Other Worlds, ed. James R. Lewis (State University of New York Press, 1995), 4.

  36. Perhaps I shouldn’t call them Ascended Masters. The “theosophical components are still there,” one scholar has noted, “but the highly evolved entity is not now understood to have originated on Earth and ascended, but rather to have originated on another planet and descended.” Christopher Partridge, “Understanding UFO Religions and Abduction Spiritualities,” in UFO Religions, ed. Christopher Partridge (Routledge, 2003), 36.

  37. Nick Herbert, “Nick Meets the Galactic Telepaths,” January 6, 2012, quantumtantra.blogspot.com/2012/01/nick-meets-galactic-telepaths.html.

  38. Decades after his death, as witch hunts were raging, Dee’s diary describing those contacts would be cited as evidence that he had been in league with the Devil. The Benevolent Conspiracy is always in danger of being recast as one of the Enemies.

  39. The most famous of the ancient-astronauts books is Erich von Däniken, Chariots of the Gods? Unsolved Mysteries of the Past, trans. Michael Heron (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1970). (First published in German in 1968.)

  40. Sylvia Browne, Sylvia Browne’s Book of Angels (Hay House, 2003), 14.

  41. Gustav Davidson, A Dictionary of Angels, Including the Fallen Angels (Free Press, 1967); Peter Lamborn Wilson, Angels (Thames and Hudson, 1980); Hope MacDonald, When Angels Appear (Zondervan, 1982).

  42. Sophy Burnham, A Book of Angels: Reflections on Angels Past and Present, and True Stories of How They Touch Our Lives (Jeremy P. Tarcher/ Penguin, 2011 [1990]), 72.

  43. Author’s interview with Sophy Burnham, March 6, 2012. All subsequent Burnham quotes are from this interview unless otherwise noted.

  44. Burnham, A Book of Angels, 118.

  45. Wilson is an anarchist and a mystic, and his copiously illustrated piece of cross-cultural scholarship ultimately paid more attention to Islam and paganism than to anything in the Bible. Any reader who bought it expecting a piece of pop Christianity was in for a surprise.

  46. Joan Wester Anderson, Where Angels Walk: True Stories of Heavenly Visitors (Ballantine, 1992), ix.

  47. Doreen Virtue, Healing with the Angels: How the Angels Can Assist You in Every Area of Your Life (Hay House, 1999), 155.

  48. Bill Myers and David Wimbish, The Dark Side of the Supernatural: What Is of God and What Isn’t (Zondervan, 2008 [1999]), 16–17.

  49. Author’s interview with Peter Lamborn Wilson, March 4, 2012.

  50. Marie D. Jones and Larry Flaxman, “11:11—The Time Prompt Phenomenon and the Profound Nature of Numbers,” Phenomena, November 2009.

  51. “Do You See 11:11?” n.d., 1111angels.net.

  52. George Mathieu Barnard, The Search for 11:11: A Journey into the Spirit World (11.11 Publishers, 2004 [2000]), ix.

  53. “11:11: What Is It About? What Does It All Mean?” n.d., board.1111 angels.com/viewtopic.php?t=345.

  54. Jack Sarfatti, “Higher Intelligence Is Us in the Future,” Spit in the Ocean 3 (1977).

  55. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, 278–79. Yates also made a speculative argument that the Rosicrucian pamphlets were intended as propaganda for one side in the struggles shaking the Holy Roman Empire.

  56. Ronald Reagan, “Your America to Be Free” (1957), reagan2020.us/speeches/Your_America_to_be_Free.asp.

  57. Mitch Horowitz, “Reagan and the Occult,” April 20, 2010, voices.washingtonpost.com/political-bookworm/2010/04/reagan_and_the_occult.html.

  58. Ronald Reagan, “Speech Announcing Presidential Candidacy” (1979), in Tear Down This Wall: The Reagan Revolution, ed. Editors of National Review (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004), 17.

  Chapter 7: The Water’s Gate

  1. Gil Scott-Heron, “H2O Gate (Watergate) Blues,” on Winter in America, LP, Strata-East Records, 1974.

  2. San Diego special agent in charge, memorandum to FBI director, November 8, 1968. Declassified COINTELPRO files can be downloaded at vault.fbi.gov.

  3. FBI director, memorandum to San Diego special agent in charge, November 26, 1968.

  4. David Cunningham, There’s Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence (University of California Press, 2004), 32. See also William W. Keller, The Liberals and J. Edgar Hoover: Rise and Fall of a Domestic Intelligence State (P
rinceton University Press, 1989), 72ff.

  5. Baltimore special agent in charge, memorandum to FBI director, March 28, 1969.

  6. Baltimore special agent in charge, memorandum to FBI director, August 26, 1969.

  7. Philadelphia special agent in charge, memorandum to FBI director, November 21, 1968.

  8. Los Angeles FBI Field Office report, July 24, 1967.

  9. Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate, Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976), 9.

  10. On the deaths of Hampton and Clark, see Mike Royko, Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago (Signet, 1971), 209–13.

  11. John Dean, “Dealing with Our Political Enemies” (1971), in Watergate: A Brief History with Documents, 2nd ed., ed. Stanley I. Kutler (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 30.

  12. Doyle Niemann, “Watergate: Excuse Us for Bragging but We Told You So!” The Great Speckled Bird, July 9, 1973.

  13. Quoted in Fred P. Graham, “F.B.I. Files of Surveillance of Students, Blacks, War Foes,” The New York Times, March 25, 1971.

  14. Kathryn S. Olmsted, Challenging the Secret Government: The Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA and FBI (University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 17.

  15. Quoted in Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate, Foreign and Military Intelligence (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976), 389.

  16. Ibid., 391.

  17. Lasky at one point received $20,000 from the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, which should put to rest any suspicion that he was an unbiased observer. For a balanced assessment of what his book got right and wrong, see Barton J. Bernstein, “Call It a Tradition,” Inquiry, November 21, 1977.

  18. Victor Lasky, It Didn’t Start with Watergate (Dial Press, 1977), 220.

  19. Nicholas B. Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Harvard University Press, 2006), 30.

  20. For an account of Felt’s actions and intentions during the Watergate scandal, see Max Holland, Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat (University Press of Kansas, 2012).

  21. For some problems with the idea that investigators were putting agents’ lives at risk, see Jesse Walker, “Agee’s Revenge,” July 14, 2005, reason.com/archives/2005/07/14/agees-revenge.

  22. On the use of the charge of McCarthyism against congressional and journalistic investigators, see Olmsted, Challenging the Secret Government, 126, 131–32, 138, 164.

  23. The Final Assassinations Report: Report of the Select Committee on Assassinations, U.S. House of Representatives (Bantam Books, 1979), 100.

  24. Roscoe Drummond, “Revived Theory of a ‘Conspiracy’ Still Resting on Tenuous Grounds,” Observer-Reporter (Washington, Pa.), January 23, 1979.

  25. I first encountered the Skeleton Key online in 1990 or so, on a proto-Internet at the University of Michigan called the Michigan Terminal System. I got the impression even then that people had been forwarding it around cyberspace for a while already.

  26. Robert Eringer, “Dossier on Conspiriologists: Mae Brussell & Peter Beter,” Critique 5 (Autumn 1981). The conversation took place in late 1977 or early 1978. Eringer’s article doesn’t identify the publication that he telephoned, but he informed me, looking back more than three decades later, that he was “reasonably certain” it was a magazine called It. Robert Eringer, e-mail to the author, April 16, 2012.

  27. Paul Krassner, Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in the Counterculture, 2nd ed. (New World Digital, 2010), 224.

  28. Mae Brussell, “From Monterey Pop to Altamont—OPERATION CHAOS: The CIA’s War Against the Sixties Counter-Culture” (1976), maebrussell.com/Mae%20Brussell%20Articles/Operation%20Chaos.html.

  29. John Judge, “Why Everybody Is a Government Patsy” (1978), in New Yippie Book Collective, Blacklisted News: Secret Histories from Chicago to 1984 (Bleecker Publishing, 1983), 546. Judge’s article originally appeared in the Yipster Times.

  30. Stephen Hall, “ ‘Robot’ Behavior of Ryan Murder Suspect,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 28, 1978.

  31. Mae Brussell, tape 365, December 1, 1978. A transcription of the tape can be found at maebrussell.com/Transcriptions/365.html.

  32. Quoted ibid. Lane did not reply to a request to comment on the quote’s accuracy.

  33. Quoted in “ ‘Crusader’ Mark Lane,” The Lawrence Daily Journal-World, November 29, 1978.

  34. Brussell, tape 365.

  35. That said, Brussellesque ideas could surface in surprising places. A popular biography of the rock star Jim Morrison, for example, included this passage:

  Still other theories claimed Jim was the victim of a political conspiracy aimed at discrediting and eliminating the hippie/New Left/counterculture lifestyle (actually this is supposed to have been a vast, pervasive, connected set of conspiracies that included the shootings at Kent State and Jackson State, the riots at Isla Vista, the Weathermen bombings, the stiff prison sentences given to Timothy Leary and the Chicago Eight, the Charlie Manson murders—not to mention the deaths of Hendrix and Joplin and more than two dozen Black Panthers).

  Rather than mocking the theory, the authors commented that “Jim was certainly popular enough and, more threateningly, smart enough to cause the powers that be ample reason to take some sort of action to prevent his subversive influence.” Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman, No One Here Gets Out Alive (Warner Books, 1981), 372.

  36. The code’s commands started to lose their force in 1952, when the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment protects motion pictures. Movies gradually grew more adventurous, and the code finally died when a ratings system replaced it in 1968.

  37. Interview at youtube.com/watch?v=fRiZtqVPJ9U.

  38. Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Indiana University Press, 1995), 55.

  39. The Parallax View, directed by Alan J. Pakula, screenplay by David Giler and Lorenzo Semple, Jr., from a novel by Loren Singer, Paramount Pictures, 1974. The Parallax View is also notable for including one of the most chilling and bizarre brainwashing sequences ever set in celluloid.

  40. Olmsted, Challenging the Secret Government, 102.

  41. Executive Action, directed by David Miller, screenplay by Dalton Trumbo, from a novel by Donald Freed and Mark Lane, National General Pictures, 1973. Freed’s other notable contribution to conspiracy cinema was to coscript Robert Altman’s Nixon movie, Secret Honor (1984).

  42. Scorpio, directed by Michael Winner, screenplay by David W. Rintels and Gerald Wilson, MGM, 1973. Winner’s previous film, The Mechanic (1972), had a similar story. In both pictures a professional assassin takes on an understudy who in turn tries to kill him. But The Mechanic’s protagonist works for a group called “the organization”—presumably the Mafia, though that is never stated outright—and we never learn much about why his victims have been slated to die. Scorpio gave the story line an explicitly political edge.

  43. The Domino Principle, directed by Stanley Kramer, screenplay by Adam Kennedy from his novel, AVCO, 1977.

  44. Network, directed by Sidney Lumet, screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky, MGM/United Artists, 1975.

  45. Another popular Spielberg film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), offered an alternative to the era’s apprehensive atmosphere by imagining a Benevolent Conspiracy. Two benevolent conspiracies, actually: There are the aliens who want to welcome humanity to the larger cosmic community, and there are the government officials who plant disinformation and cover up important facts for the citizens’ own good.

  In 1982, widely perceived as a time of greater faith in public institutions, Spielberg returned to the cinema of suspicion with E.T., a sentimental but sometimes terrifying tale in which children have to hide a friendly extraterrestrial from the government. The agents of the American state are portrayed here as a fears
ome squadron of secret police. The liberal pundit David Sirota later criticized E.T. for “depict[ing] the government as a faceless menace,” arguing that this amounted to propaganda against intervention in the economy: “Yeah, we think, why should we let those jackbooted federal sentries from E.T. make our health care decisions?” David Sirota, Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live in Now—Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Everything (Ballantine Books, 2011), 86, 93. For a critique of Sirota’s book, see Jesse Walker, “That ’80s Show,” Reason, July 2011.

  46. Ira Levin, The Stepford Wives (Random House, 1972), 50.

  47. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (Dell, 1963), 234–35.

  48. The Stepford Wives movie was the basis for three made-for-TV follow-ups. Revenge of the Stepford Wives (1980) changed the scenario somewhat: The town’s women are drugged and brainwashed rather than replaced by robots, a sign that possession and imposture are close enough in spirit for Hollywood to treat them as interchangeable. The story ends with two liberated women seizing the means of mind control and inducing a Stepford riot. In The Stepford Children (1987) the conspiracy is back to using androids, and with The Stepford Husbands (1996), predictably, the tables are turned.

  The franchise returned to theaters in 2004, when a muddled Stepford Wives remake attempted to update Levin’s story for an era when gender equality wasn’t as controversial as it was in the seventies. That take on the tale features androids and mind control, as though the screenwriter couldn’t quite make up his mind what was happening. Fittingly for a film in which people are reduced to puppets, the picture was directed by the veteran muppeteer Frank Oz.