Overview

American society has changed dramatically since A Culture of Conspiracy was first published in 2001. 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. 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. It is well known that some Americans are obsessed with conspiracies. The Kennedy assassination, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the 2001 terrorist attacks have all generated elaborate stories of hidden plots. 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. 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. This book, written by a leading expert on the subject, is the most comprehensive and authoritative examination of contemporary American conspiracism to date. Barkun discusses a range of material-involving inner-earth caves, government black helicopters, alien abductions, secret New World Order cabals, and much more-that few realize exists in our culture. Looking closely at the manifestations of these ideas in a wide range of literature and source material from religious and political literature, to New Age and UFO publications, to popular culture phenomena such as The X-Files, and to websites, radio programs, and more, Barkun finds that America is in the throes of an unrivaled period of millenarian activity. His book underscores the importance of understanding why this phenomenon is now spreading into more mainstream segments of American culture.

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9780520276826

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Reviews

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 *

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 * 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 * 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 * 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 *

Author Information

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.

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