The United States of Paranoia

by Jesse Walker

  28. See “Leftwing Extremists Likely to Increase Use of Cyber Attacks over the Coming Decade,” U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Office of Intelligence and Analysis, January 26, 2009, fas.org/irp/eprint/leftwing.pdf.

  29. Michael German, “Soon, We’ll All Be Radicals,” April 16, 2009, aclu.org/blog/national-security-technology-and-liberty/soon-well-all-be-radicals.

  30. Johnson, Right-Wing Resurgence, 266.

  31. Allison Kilkenny, “Discussion of Dead Census Worker Highlights Right-Wing Paranoia,” September 24, 2009, huffingtonpost.com/allison-kilkenny/discussion-of-dead-census_b_298534.html.

  32. Rick Ungar, “Send the Body to Glenn Beck,” September 24, 2009, trueslant.com/rickungar/2009/09/24/send-the-body-to-glenn-beck-kentucky-census-worker-hanged-fed-clay-county.

  33. Josh Marshall, “Ideas Have Consequences,” February 18, 2010, talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2010/02/ideas_have_consequences .php.

  34. CNN Newsroom, CNN, August 28, 2009.

  35. For the original assertion, see Ronald Kessler, In the President’s Secret Service: Behind the Scenes with Agents in the Line of Fire and the Presidents They Protect (Crown, 2009), 225.

  36. Author’s interview with Malcolm Wiley, March 30, 2010.

  37. Quoted in Rachel Slajda, “Secret Service Director: Threats Against Obama Not Up,” December 3, 2009, archive.is/Qpp7.

  38. Martin Vaughan, “Threats Against IRS Employees on the Rise, Official Says,” The Wall Street Journal, February 21, 2010.

  39. I spoke with the official in April 2010.

  40. Paul Krugman, “Climate of Hate,” The New York Times, January 9, 2011. The report he’s referring to is Erika Lovley, “Exclusive: FBI Details Surge in Death Threats Against Lawmakers,” May 25, 2010, politico.com/news/stories/0510/37726.html.

  41. Mark Potok, “Rage on the Right,” Intelligence Report, Spring 2010.

  42. “Active ‘Patriot’ Groups in the United States in 2009,” Intelligence Report, Spring 2010.

  43. Ibid.

  44. Quoted in Alan Maimon, “Oath Keepers Pledges to Prevent Dictatorship in United States,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, October 8, 2009.

  45. Quoted in Jennifer Chambers and Doug Guthrie, “FBI Raids Mich.-Based Militia Group,” The Detroit News, March 29, 2010.

  46. David Neiwert, “FBI Busts of Michigan Militias’ Hutaree Sect Once Again Rip the Facade Away from Patriots’ Civil Pose,” March 29, 2010, crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/fbi-busts-michigan-militias -hutaree.

  47. Author’s interview with Amy Cooter, March 31, 2010.

  48. Quoted in Mike Wilkinson, “Other Militias Told on Hutaree,” The Detroit News, April 17, 2010.

  49. Arie Perliger, “Challengers from the Sidelines: Understanding America’s Violent Far-Right,” Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, November 2012, ctc.usma.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/ChallengersFromtheSidelines.pdf. All subsequent Perliger quotes come from this paper.

  50. The 1996 campaign was an exception, Perliger hypothesized, because it featured “the least-competitive elections of the last 22 years.” He raised the possibility that “far-right groups and individuals are more inclined to engage in violence in a contentious political climate.” Maybe.

  51. I do not mean to suggest that the militias necessarily opposed the Minutemen’s agenda and vice versa. Many militiamen wanted stronger border controls, and many Minutemen favored reducing government power in areas unrelated to immigration. But even where there was overlap, the emphasis was different.

  52. Daryl Johnson’s company, DT Analytics, includes the birthers among the groups it tracks, listing “Birthers, Truthers, Oath Keepers and Three Percenters” as examples of “anti-government extremists” on “the far right of the political spectrum.” People who adopt such “extremist belief systems” have allowed a “poison” into their minds, the company’s site says; they may be on “the path from extremist sympathizer to extremist activist to terrorist.” “Radicalization and Mobilization,” n.d., dtanalytics.org/help.php.

  53. The Lou Dobbs Show, United Stations Radio Networks, July 15, 2009.

  54. Hardball, MSNBC, July 23, 2009.

  55. Gene Healy, The Cult of the Presidency: America’s Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power (Cato Institute, 2008), 4.

  56. Gary G. Kreep, “FAX All 50 State Attorneys General to Investigate Obama’s Birthday Fraud,” July 2009, scribd.com/doc/17682329/Why-Can-Obama-Keep-College-Papers-Hidden.

  57. Bob Miller, “Got Birth Certificate?” July 15, 2009, unitedconservatives.blogspot.com/2009/07/got-birth-certificate.html.

  58. “An Open Letter to Barack Obama,” December 1, 2008, wethepeoplefoundation.org/UPDATE/misc2008/Obama-USA-TODAY-ad.htm.

  59. Hugh McInnish, “Fire the Silver Bullet!” The McInnish Newsletter, May 21, 2009.

  60. On Point, National Public Radio, July 27, 2009.

  61. Markos Moulitsas (markos), “Mission Accomplished, Sarah Palin, http://is.gd/knNgl,” tweet, January 8, 2011, 2:19 P.M. Moulitsas’s link went to a post at the liberal site Firedoglake that reprinted the Palin map under the headline “Sarah Palin’s Hit List.”

  62. Michael Daly, “Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ Blood Is on Sarah Palin’s Hands After Putting Cross Hair over District,” Daily News, January 9, 2011.

  63. Ed Pilkington, “Jared Lee Loughner: Erratic, Disturbed and Prone to Rightwing Rants,” The Guardian, January 9, 2011.

  64. Erad3 [Jared Lee Loughner], “Infinite Source of Currency!?!?” August 7, 2010, abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread591520/pg1.

  65. Will Rahn, “Fellow Commenters at UFO Conspiracy Website Questioned Jared Lee Loughner’s Sanity in Threads,” January 11, 2011, dailycaller.com/2011/01/11/fellow-commenters-at-ufo-conspiracy -website-questioned-jared-lee-loughners-sanity-in-threads.

  66. youtube.com/watch?v=nHoaZaLbqB4.

  67. Mark Potok, “Who Is Jared Lee Loughner?” January 9, 2011, splcenter.org/blog/2011/01/09/who-is-jared-lee-loughner. Potok elaborated: “Miller claims that the government uses grammar to ‘enslave’ Americans and offers up his truly weird ‘Truth-language’ as an antidote. For example, he says that if you add colons and hyphens to your name in a certain way, you are no longer taxable.” Loughner, meanwhile, wrote that the government was performing “mind control on the people by controlling grammar.” QED.

  It could conceivably emerge that Loughner encountered Miller’s ideas at some point. But it’s worth noting some things that Loughner hasn’t done. For one, he hasn’t added any colons or hyphens to his name. Also, he hasn’t declared that he isn’t taxable. Miller’s following, to the extent that he has one, consists of people who think his ideas will let them avoid penalties in court. Yet when Loughner was arraigned, a day after Potok published his speculations, he didn’t invoke a single Millerism. And while Miller believes he has discovered a “correct language” (sorry, “:Correct-Language:”) that everyone should use instead of the “bastardized” English imposed by elites, Loughner’s YouTube channel raised the possibility of creating new languages. What exactly he meant by that is anyone’s guess, but it sounds rather different from Miller’s project.

  68. Quoted in Nick Baumann, “Exclusive: Loughner Friend Explains Alleged Gunman’s Grudge Against Giffords,” January 10, 2011, motherjones.com/politics/2011/01/jared-lee-loughner-friend-voicemail-phone-message.

  69. Harsh Realm was created by Chris Carter, the man behind The X-Files.

  70. My fantasy for how the trilogy should have concluded: After learning that every level of reality is just another matrix, Neo shrugs his shoulders and walks off the film set. A digital camera follows him across the street to a lecture hall, where a professor is denouncing metafiction and declaring postmodernism a literary dead end. Keanu’s cell rings: It’s his agent. We hear them chatting about how much they’re making from Matrix merchandise. Then the wall collapses and the cast of Blazing Saddles falls into the classroom, throwing pies.

  71. Philip K. Dick, “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall
Apart Two Days Later” (1978), in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, ed. Lawrence Sutin (Vintage Books, 1995), 262.

  72. After a series of mystical experiences in the 1970s, Dick began to believe this was happening in his life as well as his stories. In one of the theories he conceived to explain what he had gone through, he suggested that the world we seem to live in is a Matrix-like “Black Iron Prison.” (This idea worked its way into one of his last and best novels, the autobiographical VALIS.) He also played with the idea of a Benevolent Conspiracy. At one point he told an interviewer that “the Illuminati are doing for Bob Wilson and me what God is doing for everybody else. Running the world very well, and doing a great job of it.” Quoted in Gregg Rickman, Philip K. Dick: The Last Testament (Fragments West/Valentine Press, 1985), 42.

  73. wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jamie_Kane&diff=528503901&oldid=20854738.

  74. Fraser M, “Jamie Kane Dead,” Top of the Pops, April 6, 2005.

  75. The Beast had precursors, of course. For an overview of ARGs’ antecedents, see Bryan Alexander, The New Digital Storytelling: Creating Narratives with New Media (Praeger, 2011), 153–55.

  76. Jane McGonigal, “ ‘This Is Not a Game’: Immersive Aesthetics and Collective Play,” Digital Arts & Culture 2003 Conference Proceedings, May 2003.

  77. Quoted ibid.

  78. Quoted ibid.

  79. Quoted in Cory Doctorow, “BBC: Wikipedia Is Not a Viral Marketing Tool,” August 15, 2005, boingboing.net/2005/08/15/bbc-wikipedia-is-not.html.

  80. Bryan Alexander, “ARG vs Wikipedia vs Blogosphere,” August 16, 2005, infocult.typepad.com/infocult/2005/08/arg_vs_wikipedi.html.

  81. Quoted in Robert Anton Wilson, “Timothy Leary and His Psychological H-Bomb,” The Realist, August 1964.

  82. Quoted in Xeni Jardin, “BBC Punks Wikipedia in Game Marketing Ploy?” August 13, 2005, boingboing.net/2005/08/13/bbc-punks-wikipedia.html.

  83. youtube.com/watch?v=ESguSeFQzzk. In another throwback to the seventies, Dollins devoted a portion of the lecture to describing the movie Telefon. He suggested that the film’s army of Manchurian candidates actually exists and that it is capable of carrying out attacks on U.S. soil.

  84. In 1990, half a decade before those cards were published, the Secret Service raided Steve Jackson’s offices because an agent suspected that hackers were using an electronic bulletin board the company ran. The bulletin board was called Illuminati, and its tongue-in-cheek welcome message may have played a role in unleashing the raid. As District Judge Sam Sparks wrote, a federal agent “reviewed a printout of Illuminati on February 25, 1990, which read, ‘Greetings, Mortal! You have entered the secret computer system of the Illuminati, the on-line home of the world’s oldest and largest secret conspiracy . . . fronted by Steve Jackson Games, Incorporated. Fnord.’ The evidence in this case strongly suggests Agent Foley, without any further investigation, misconstrued this information to believe the Illuminati bulletin board was similar in purpose to [a different] bulletin board, which provided information to and was used by ‘hackers.’ ” Steve Jackson Games v. United States Secret Service, U.S. District Court, W.D. Texas, Austin Division, March 12, 1993. Years later, naturally, a story spread that the raid had been intended to stop the distribution of the Illuminati cards.

  85. Jonah Weiner, “Is Lady Gaga a Satanist Illuminati Slave?” November 21, 2011, slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2011/11/lady_gaga_kanye_west_jay_z_the_conspiracy_theories_that_say_pop_stars_are_illuminati_pawns.html.

  86. godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message1871717/pg1.

  87. Dr. Dre, “Been There, Done That,” on The Aftermath, CD, Aftermath Entertainment, 1996.

  88. Raekwon, Pusha T, Common, 2 Chainz, Cyhi the Prynce, Kid Cudi, and D’banj, “The Morning,” on G.O.O.D. Music: Cruel Summer, CD, G.O.O.D. Music/Def Jam, 2012.

  89. Prodigy, “Illuminati,” on H.N.I.C. Pt. 2, CD, AAO Music, 2008. Prodigy was heavily influenced by Malachi York, a figure whose worldview mixed black nationalism, ufology, and the legal theories of the sovereign citizens. In the lead-up to the 2012 presidential primaries, Prodigy endorsed the race’s most vocal critic of the New World Order, the constitutionalist libertarian Ron Paul.

  90. Jonesy in the Morning, WUSL, November 3, 2009.

  91. Rick Ross featuring Jay-Z, “Free Mason,” on Teflon Don, CD, Def Jam/Maybach Music/Slip N Slide, 2010.

  92. That was in the Marvel Comics universe. Marvel’s chief rival, DC, had already featured an evil order called the Illuminati in Time Masters, a 1990 miniseries written by Bob Wayne and Lewis Shiner. Shiner was a vocal fan of Illuminatus!, and Wayne used that interest to get him involved with the comic: “When Bob first pitched the Time Masters series to me, he put the Illuminati in there specifically to hook me.” Lewis Shiner, e-mail to the author, April 4, 2013.

  93. Holy Blood, Holy Grail also contributed a conspiracy theory to one of Robert Anton Wilson’s prequels to the Illuminatus! trilogy. See Robert Anton Wilson, The Widow’s Son (Bluejay, 1985).

  94. Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code (Anchor Books, 2006), 273.

  95. The sculpture, Jim Sanborn’s Kryptos, itself contains a coded message, which amateurs and CIA analysts alike have been attempting to solve since the artwork was erected in 1990.

  96. The conspiracy text that took the everything-is-a-clue mind-set further than any other just might be “King-Kill/33°” (1987), James Shelby Downard’s samizdat essay on the JFK assassination. Downard analyzed the external world with techniques more akin to literary criticism, searching for symbolism and attributing it to a Masonic hidden hand. Here is a typical passage:

  Let us take as an example the “Mason Road” in Texas that connects to the “Mason No El Bar” the Texas-New Mexico (“The Land of Enchantment”) border. This connecting line is on the 32nd degree. The thirty-second degree in Masonry of the Scottish Rite is the next to the highest degree awarded. . . .

  When this thirty-second degree line is traced some little distance farther west, into Arizona, it crosses an old trail which meandered north of what is now another ghost town but which at one time was the town of “Ruby.” . . . [T]he Ruby road twists north into the area of two mountain peaks that are known as the Kennedy and Johnson Mountains.

  Downard’s document was produced with the assistance of Michael A. Hoffman II, a Fortean anti-Semite who has staked out what may be a unique position on the intellectual spectrum: He believes that the Holocaust didn’t exist but fairies do.

  97. lysistrata, “He Let Them Down. He Ran Around and Hurt Them,” June 25, 2008, metafilter.com/72804/He-let-them-down-He-ran-around-and-hurt-them.

  Epilogue: The Monster at the End of This Book

  1. David Hume, The Natural History of Religion (A. and H. Bradlaugh Bonner, 1889 [1757]), 11.

  2. Mark Phillips, Satan in the Smoke? A Photojournalist’s 9/11 Story (South Brooklyn Internet, 2011), e-book.

  3. “Devil Face in Smoke of 911 at the WTC,” n.d., at christianmedia.us/devil-face.html.

  4. Texe Marrs, “Face of the Devil,” n.d., at texemarrs.com/102001/face_of_devil.htm.

  5. Quoted in “Faces in the Cloud,” April 23, 2008, snopes.com/rumors/wtcface.asp.

  6. “Allah’s Edict Against Terrorism,” n.d., devilsmokemessageforum.blogspot.com/2012/06/comments.html.

  7. Sadly, the bird goes unmentioned in The Da Vinci Code.

  8. “Dali Gives His Theories on Painting,” The Hartford Courant, December 19, 1935.

  9. Rob MacDougall, “Pastplay,” May 5, 2010, www.robmacdougall.org/blog/2010/05/pastplay. The game was partly inspired by Umberto Eco’s 1988 novel Foucault’s Pendulum.

  10. Quoted in “Tim Powers Rewrites the Cold War,” October 10, 2006, powells.com/blog/interviews/tim-powers-rewrites-the-cold-war-by-dave.

  11. Paul Krassner, Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut, 2nd ed. (New World Digital, 2010), 213.

  12. “Paranoia seems to require being imitated to be understood, and it, in turn, see
ms to understand only by imitation.” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Duke University Press, 2003), 131.

  13. Michael Shermer, The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (Times Books, 2011), 87. Shermer applied the idea of agenticity to conspiracy theories on 207–27.

  INDEX

  The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific entry, please use your e-book reader’s search tools.

  Note: Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.

  abolitionists, 95–96, 98, 99, 101

  Abraham, Larry, 200

  Adams, John, 110, 113

  Adams, John Quincy, 116, 122, 352

  advertising, 72–73, 75, 77, 106, 203

  African Americans:

  Black Panthers, 130, 159, 162, 239, 383

  and KKK, 99, 129, 289

  and militias, 289–92

  “night doctors,” 127–29

  racial unrest, 104–8, 130–31

  slave insurrections, 83–96, 98–99, 101, 132

  and sterilization, 129–30

  Tuskegee experiment, 128–29