It was clear that, even though the army colonel was trained in public relations and handling a crowd, he was up against something completely different.
“When we have a federal government that cannot tell the truth, how do we know that what you’re saying is true?” asked one of the commission judges, reading from an audience questions card. The overflow audience of about five hundred people packed into the Bastrop County Commission chambers in Texas cheered loudly.1
The officer, Lieutenant Colonel Mark Lastoria of U.S. Army Special Operations Command, was there to try to explain to his rural audience how and why the largest training exercise in the army’s history, code-named Jade Helm 15, was scheduled to take place over the course of two months in a broad swath of the nation’s countryside, mainly in seven states in the Southwest and interior West, that summer of 2015.
“We’re truly invested in everybody’s personal rights and their privacy,” Lastoria told the audience. “That’s what we live for, to support the Constitution of the United States and that’s what everybody wants to protect. . . . We’re not going to be interfering with people’s livelihoods, or negatively impact their farms. Some of these counties that we’re going to be in, they’re very concerned that we’re going to disrupt recreational activity. It’s not going to happen.”
The first questioner came to the microphone, introduced himself, then asked: “In spite of people’s overwhelming opposition to this program, would the commission consider rescinding their invitation to these guys? And would the court be offended if I told the colonel that I didn’t believe a single word that he just said?”
There was more raucous applause.
Someone then told Lastoria that Jade Helm appeared to be nothing more than “a preparation for martial law.”
“It is not a preparation for martial law,” the colonel answered.
“That’s what you say,” his interlocutor replied. Again, the crowd cheered.
“It has nothing to do with martial law, period. We are Title 10 forces, not Title 32, nothing like that. No martial law in any way, shape, or form. We basically simply want to train United States Special Operations forces for future operations overseas. That’s it,” Lastoria explained.
No one in the audience seemed convinced. Notably, there were large numbers of Infowars T-shirts among the people voicing the most skepticism, and indeed the questions reflected claims that Alex Jones had been making on his nationally broadcast conspiracy theory program.2
According to Jones, Jade Helm was tantamount to martial law. He told his listeners that because the special operations forces from four branches of the U.S. military would be blending in with local populations, they were in fact secretly training for an eventual battle to disarm Americans.
“Jade Helm 15 is more than just a military exercise, it’s also an exercise of the new field in geospatial intelligence using human domain analytics to map the politics and thoughts of any nation, state, city, right down to the individual,” he told his audience.
Jones had been circulating similar theories for a while. The previous year he had claimed that a much smaller army training exercise involving a mockup of an urban invasion zone actually was intended to prepare armed forces for an attack on American citizens, labeling it part of “a giant buildup for war with the American people.”
All along, army officials dismissed these claims, particularly as Jade Helm came under attack. The exercise, they asserted, was nothing more than “routine training to maintain a high level of readiness for [special forces] since they must be ready to support potential missions anywhere in the world at a moment’s notice.” Lastoria told reporters that “the concerns expressed center around misinterpretations.
“Unofficial sources providing inaccurate information on Jade Helm want people to believe that it’s something other than a training exercise,” Lastoria said.
The theories even spread to Fox News, where Megyn Kelly described the conspiracy theorists merely as “critics”: “Well, conspiracy theories are running wild tonight about the army’s plan for a multistate training exercise this summer called ‘Jade Helm 15,’” she told her audience. “While the military says they’re just training soldiers for the realities of war, critics say the army is preparing for modern-day martial law.”3
What apparently drove the theorists to leap to the conclusion that the exercise was nefarious in intent was a map that had been leaked in connection with the army’s mock strategy for the exercise showing that Texas and Utah, as well as parts of California, had been designated “hostile territory.” Jones and others immediately claimed this reflected the Obama administration’s view of those states and suggested that this was more preparation for martial law.
“Training with the police, training with locals in plainclothes, quote, doing suspicious activities, is to train the police to work with the military in covert operations, and to condition the military to accept it, and to condition the public to accept it, and then when we cover it and talk about it, they practice a psyop in real time, putting out this information,” Jones claimed.4
Infowars was hardly alone. Some right-wing radio talkers from Texas began making similar claims. Next News Network, a right-wing website with a history of regurgitating propaganda from Russian websites, also chimed in with a series of reports on Jade Helm. In one video, an announcer intoned: “This is without doubt the largest public-conditioning exercise in American history. This, as the public watches Cheyenne Mountain reopening in anticipation of an EMP attack, and key operations of the New York Federal Reserve moving to Chicago in the event of a natural disaster. Now the event that is truly on the horizon is anyone’s guess, however, one thing is for sure: troops will be ready and trained to take over your town when it happens.”5
One of the men who questioned Lastoria in Bastrop was particularly keen to know if a memorandum created by the Department of Homeland Security in 2009 describing how right-wing extremists might target military veterans for recruitment—and citing certain conservative causes, including gun rights and abortion, as among the issues around which radical terrorists might act—had any role in the army’s designations of the area as “hostile.”
Infowars interviewed him afterward. “I think what concerns me the most is, I am a student of history, and I know that governments go tyrannical,” the man said. “And I know that our government, through Homeland Security, has labeled people like the kind of people that live in Bastrop that are conservative gun owners, libertarians, veterans, the government’s labeled those people as potential terrorists. And so I do see an odd correlation between a huge military buildup and a hostile designation for the state of Texas in this area.”6
Conservative Texas politicians echoed this paranoia. Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas released a statement on Jade Helm, noting, “When leaders within the current administration believe that major threats to the country include those who support the Constitution, are military veterans, or even ‘cling to guns or religion,’ patriotic Americans have reason to be concerned.”7
U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, who was gearing up for a run as a presidential candidate that year, blamed it on President Obama: “When the federal government has not demonstrated itself to be trustworthy in this administration, the natural consequence is that many citizens don’t trust what it is saying.”8
Shortly after the Bastrop gathering, Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, sent a letter to the commander of the Texas State Guard ordering his men to monitor the Jade Helm operations. “During the training operation, it is important that Texans know their safety, constitutional rights, private property rights and civil liberties will not be infringed,” he wrote. (It later emerged that much of the hysteria regarding Jade Helm was in fact the product of a Russian disinformation campaign intended to sow chaos among American voters and disrupt an American military exercise.)9
That afternoon before the Bastrop commission, Lastoria tried to reassure the crowd by appealing to their patriotism. “I’d like everyone to not confuse apples and pumpkins, OK?” he told the audience and pointed to his army patches. “This institution has been around for 240 years. You may have issues with the administration, OK? So be it. But this institution has been with you for 240 years. Period.”
However, what soon became clear was that his very presence there was interpreted by the conspiracists who packed the room as powerful evidence of a psychological operation, or “psyops,” as it’s known in the conspiracy world, by the army.
“It appears that the psyops are taking place right now,” one questioner insisted. “And psychological operations, meaning psychological warfare, that would be a weapon being used against citizens if you’re talking about blaming it, obtaining information, all that sort of stuff.”
Lastoria, of course, patiently denied this: “One, there’s not a psyop campaign going on associated with that. This is an information brief, and it has nothing to do with private citizens. . . . That’s not normally part of a training exercise.”
Another asked if, by blending in, the soldiers participating would be gathering information on people in the community “that they’ll come in later and pick everybody up.”
Lastoria repeated: “Everybody truly wants this to be something that it is not. All we want to do is make sure that our guys are trained for combat overseas. That’s it.”
The more he sounded persuasive and reasonable, the worse things got.
“My question is, why is it not reasonable for me as a private citizen who just questions things—maybe some conspiracy theories, but some of us just have questions,” one man asked. “Why is it not reasonable for me to see this as absolute training for a domestic rendition program where eventually, worst-case scenario, in a potential battle, good folks like yourselves who swore an oath would go after Alex Jones, Joe Biggs, Jakari Jackson—why is it not reasonable, sir, for me to be scared of that?”
“There’s a reason that people have problems with this,” an elderly woman interviewed by Infowars said afterward. “It’s not irrational fears. It’s well-founded fears.”
Later that summer, as the exercise actually got under way and every locale in which it was supposed to occur came to realize that the whole operation was very low-key and designed not to create problems, much of the paranoia simmered down. However, in the mind of conspiracy theorists, the very lack of such evidence is actually proof that something nefarious is occurring, and so a number of the dedicated “Patriots” worked into a lather by Infowars began taking matters into their own hands.
In August, gunshots were fired for two consecutive days near the Camp Shelby Joint Forces Training Center in Mississippi’s Perry County, where 4,600 National Guard and Army Reserve troops were participating in the exercise. No one was arrested, but Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant ordered some of the military personnel to be armed as a precaution.
A few days later in North Carolina, federal agents assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task Force in Charlotte arrested three men, including a previously convicted felon, on a variety of conspiracy and firearms violations. The trio had purchased assorted high-quality military gear and ammunition and were making homemade explosives in anticipation of interacting with Jade Helm troops, charging documents claimed.10
Walter Eugene Litteral, fifty, Christopher James Baker, forty-two, and Christopher Todd Campbell, thirty, expressed “their disapproval of the Jade Helm military exercises” to an FBI informant, their federal criminal complaint said.
At trial, it emerged that Litteral had been building an arsenal of explosive devices, including tennis-ball bombs and a variety of pipe bombs, as well as simple bombs using coffee cans, gunpowder, and ball bearings. He even had figured out how to make a dummy grenade into a live one.
Litteral, prosecutors said, “believed that the United States government intended to use the armed forces to impose martial law, which the conspirators planned to resist with violent force.”
The suspects also discussed a ninety-nine-acre “base camp” near Clover, South Carolina, where they intended to plant booby traps and lure government forces in and “kill them.”
All three men pleaded guilty. Litteral was sentenced to twenty-two months in prison, while Baker and Campbell each received twenty months.
When Jade Helm wrapped up in September 2015, it was almost as if it had never happened as far as the communities where it was held were concerned.11 But following the uproar around it, the army has not attempted a similar exercise of that scale again.
________
Conspiracy theories used to exist in a universe almost wholly separate from the real world of policy and politics. That’s because, for most of their history, conspiracies have been offered as counternarratives to the official explanation for a range of historic real-life events—that is, they usually have come after the fact, and they rarely if ever have changed anything. In the new age of conspiracism, the theories have taken on a life of their own that, as with Jade Helm, are fatally infecting real-world policy and even military outcomes.
There is a long and colorful history of conspiracy theories infecting popular culture and discourse—indeed, much of American history is interwoven with them. For the most part, that effect has been diversionary at worst, but there always has been a dark side to them, closely related to their central function, which is to scapegoat.
One of the oldest conspiracy theories—perhaps the Ur-smear—is what is commonly known as the “blood libel”: namely, the claim, originating in the mists of antiquity, that Jews used the blood of Christian children, obtained ritually from sacrificed abductees, to leaven their matzo dough. Over the years, there have been about 150 recorded cases of Jews being tortured and murdered by mobs because of this belief.12
Around the twelfth century, the legend became so widespread and thoroughly believed in the English countryside that there were massacres of Jews in London and York, and the Jewish delegation attending the coronation of Richard the Lionhearted was attacked by the London crowd.13 A Benedictine monk penned an “investigation” of a boy’s murder in 1144 that claimed that a secret international council of Jews oversaw the annual ritual killing of a Christian boy at Easter time and had selected England that year.14 By 1255, when another boy named Hugh of Lincoln was found in a well (the story is even recounted in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales),15 the hysteria became so widespread and extreme that King Henry III—who also stood to gain considerably financially by having his debtors executed—intervened and ninety-one Jews were arrested and taken to the Tower of London, eighteen of whom were put to death, and issued edicts banning Jews from commerce with other Britons. His successor, Edward I, took the final step and ordered the expulsion of all Jews from England in 1290. The ban remained in place until 1655.16
Over the centuries, of course, a number of real-world plots and conspiracies affected the course of European politics, and the reality of these conspiracies led also to a number of theories about them that turned out, in fact, to be completely bogus. As with the blood libel claims, these theories not only were hyperventilating nonsense, they often created scapegoats of an entire class of people. The most notorious of these was the “Popish Plot” of seventeenth-century England, when a cleric named Titus Oates composed a manuscript claiming that there was a massive conspiracy by the Catholic Church to assassinate King Charles II. The ensuing three-year panic after its 1678 publication led to the execution of twenty-two men, most of them Jesuit priests. Five Catholic lords were imprisoned in the tower, and the king ordered the expulsion of all Catholics from London. Eventually, Oates was exposed as a fraud and convicted of perjury, for which he spent three years in prison.17
Then there were the Bavarian Illuminati, whose legacy remains very much with us. Between 1776 and 1785, this clandestine collection of highly educated civic and intellectual leaders met in secret with the intent of overpowering the prevailing monarchist rule in Europe and replacing it with an Enlightenment-based society opposed to superstition and religious influence over political life.18 Led by a Bavarian professor of philosophy named Adam Weishaupt, they essentially plotted to take over the world through secretive methods, because they had good reason to believe that monarchists were too ruthless for them to attempt such a massive political change in public view.19
The Illuminati started out small in number but gradually grew to somewhere between 650 and 2,500 members, many of them elite politicians and people in positions of authority and influence. Much of their recruitment came from within the ranks of another secret society, the Freemasons, who similarly shared Enlightenment ideals.20 Initially, it was very popular within the more educated circles of aristocratic society, but then it ran afoul of the ruling aristocracy, as well as the pro-monarchic sect within the ranks of Freemasonry known as the Rosicrucians. In 1785, Charles Theodore, the elector of Bavaria, banned all secret societies, with a particular eye on the Illuminati. Weishaupt lost his teaching position and was exiled to a remote Germanic duchy, where he lived out his years still teaching philosophy.21
The lasting influence of the Illuminati, however, lies in the fear that they created due to their secretive and subversive nature, and particularly in the way they challenged the ruling monarchical order. Notably, a few years after the group’s demise, a conspiracy-minded Jesuit priest with a fondness for defending the authorities in power named Augustin Barruel published a 1793 text claiming that the excesses of the French Revolution’s Jacobins were the fault of the Illuminati and its machinations. He also claimed that the conspiracy’s design in fact was eventually to destroy Christianity and the church.22
A Scottish professor named John Robison lustily joined in, publishing a tract titled Proofs of a Conspiracy against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, Carried on in the Secret Meetings of Freemasons, Illuminati and Reading Societies. Robison’s claim was that the Illuminati had first penetrated the Freemasons and then gone on to twist and pervert the civic institutions the same men had led. He described Weishaupt as “a human devil” and his mission as pure malevolent destruction.23 The tract was widely read and influential; George Washington replied in correspondence after reading the book that he doubted the Illuminati’s reach had become deep into the United States but that it had been attempted, he said, “is too evident to be questioned.”24
The anti-Catholicism of the old English Popish Plot hoax was revived in the 1840s in the United States as an entrenched belief about Irish and Italian immigrants—namely, that they were “papists” whose first loyalty was to the Pope and the Vatican and Americans only secondarily.25 The most prominent progenitor of this view—which came to call itself “nativism,” referring to the descendants of the original thirteen colonies’ occupants—was the inventor of the single-wire telegraph and its code system, Samuel F. B. Morse. In the 1830s, Morse began railing against the “invasion” of the country by rough-necked Irish Catholics.26
Morse published a text titled Foreign Conspiracy against the Liberties of the United States and Imminent Dangers to the Free Institutions of the United States through Foreign Immigration. He warned his readers that America’s democratic institutions were viewed as a threat by European despots, many of them allied with the Catholic Church, itself a type of gigantic despotism in Morse’s view. They were sending their secret minions to undermine and destroy those institutions, he claimed, in the person of those immigrants.27
“You are marked for their prey,” he warned ominously, “not by foreign bayonets, but by weapons surer of effecting the conquest of liberty than all the munitions of physical combat in the military or naval storehouses of Europe.” The only way to save America, Morse insisted, was to shut off all immigration.
Morse’s book helped spawn the nativist movement, and the results were brutal: in New York, nativists battled Irish immigrants in violent riots in which scores were killed.28 In 1844, a series of Philadelphia riots resulted in churches being burned to the ground and dozens of homes destroyed, as well as several dozen deaths and many more injuries. It also led to the creation of a political party—the Know Nothing Party, which, after it won seats in Congress in 1854, renamed itself the American Party—dedicated to combating the “Romanist” plot to subvert American liberty, and fundamentally anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant, xenophobic, and prone to violence.29
________
The nativist movement and its anti-immigrant paranoia concocted another conspiracy theory with lasting consequences: the “Yellow Peril.”30 This was the racial animus that began rising against immigrant Chinese laborers in the American West in the 1870s after the great intercontinental rail lines were completed and the imported laborers suddenly were no longer welcome. The white supremacists of the era began warning then that Asians threatened to overwhelm Europeans and Americans with their sheer numbers.31
During the successful drive to exclude them—culminating in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882—popular prejudices of the nativist variety came into full play, such as a labor organizer’s screed warning of “China’s Menace to the World”:
MEN FROM CHINA come here to do LAUNDRY WORK. The Chinese Empire contains 600,000,000 (six hundred millions) inhabitants.
The supply of these men is inexhaustible.
Every one doing this work takes BREAD from the mouths of OUR WOMEN.
So many have come of late, that to keep at work, they are obliged to cut prices.
And now, we appeal to the public, asking them will they be partners to a deal which is only one of their many onward marches in CRUSHING OUT THE INDUSTRIES OF OUR COUNTRY from our people by grasping them themselves. Will you oblige the AMERICAN LAUNDRIES to CUT THE WAGES OF THEIR PEOPLE by giving your patronage to the CHINAMEN?32
It took on a special life, however, when Japanese began emigrating to the United States in the mid-1890s, in many regards taking the place of Chinese laborers on rail lines. Mostly this went unnoticed until Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, an event that shocked the reigning white supremacist worldview, since it marked the first time a nonwhite nation had managed a military victory over a white European power. Suddenly Japanese immigration was not just racially distasteful, but a perceived threat.33
Japan’s victory and the Treaty of Portsmouth sparked imaginative fears among white supremacists of a looming Asian world domination. California newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst adopted the “Yellow Peril” as a major storyline and began widely disseminating the theories around them through the San Francisco Examiner, which in 1907 published a two-part Sunday supplement titled “Japan May Seize the Pacific Coast,” which reported that “the Yellow Peril is here.”34
Popular literature, too, contained similar motifs. Homer Lea’s bestseller The Valor of Ignorance, published in 1909, prophesied a great war between the United States and Japan, and even published maps showing the likely routes of an invading imperial force on the western American coast.35
The theory underlying the Yellow Peril posited that the Japanese emperor intended to invade the Pacific coast and that he was sending these immigrants to American shores as shock troops to prepare the way for just such a military action and to lay the groundwork for acts of sabotage and espionage when the signal was given. As California politician James Phelan put it in 1907, the Japanese immigrants represented an “enemy within our gates.”36
Phelan—who served a single term in the U.S. Senate and was the mayor of San Francisco—was probably the single most prominent figure in California on the issue of Japanese immigration. In 1906, then-Mayor Phelan denounced Japanese immigrants in a speech: “They now occupy valleys in California by lease or purchase of land to the exclusion of not only whites but Chinese, and if this silent invasion is permitted by the federal government, they would at the rate at which they are coming, a thousand a month, soon convert the fairest state in the union into a Japanese colony. If they were naturalized they would outvote us.
“But California is white man’s country, and the two races cannot live side by side in peace, and inasmuch as we discovered the country first and occupied it, we propose to hold it against either a peaceful or a warlike invasion.”37
Phelan was of course part of a much larger movement, embodied in such groups as the Asiatic Exclusion League, which in its May 1905 newsletter pronounced the following:
“As long as California is white man’s country, it will remain one of the grandest and best states in the union, but the moment the Golden State is subjected to an unlimited Asiatic coolie invasion there will be no more California.”38
Then the Examiner got into a Bay-area newspaper war with the San Francisco Chronicle, the latter of which began trying to out-jingo its rival by running sensational headlines:
The Yellow Peril—How Japanese Crowd Out the White Race
Japanese a Menace to American Women
Brown Artisans Steal Brains of Whites39
Eventually, this agitation led to the passage of Alien Land Laws, forbidding Japanese farmers from owning land. There were also national bestsellers that supported these sentiments, such as Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race, published in 1916, which asserted:
We Americans must realize that the altruistic ideals which have controlled our social development during the past century, and the maudlin sentimentalism that has made America “an asylum for the oppressed,” are sweeping the nation toward a racial abyss. If the Melting Pot is allowed to boil without control, and we continue to follow our national motto and deliberately blind ourselves to all “distinctions of race, creed, or color,” the type of native American of Colonial descent will become as extinct as the Athenian of the age of Pericles, and the Viking of the days of Rollo.40
A few years later, his fellow eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard published an accompanying tome, The Rising Tide of Color: The Threat against White World-Supremacy, which concluded:
“Finally perish!” That is the exact alternative which confronts the white race. For white civilization is to-day conterminous with the white race. The civilizations of the past were local. They were confined to a particular people or group of peoples. If they failed, there were always some unspoiled, well-endowed barbarians to step forward and “carry on.” But today there are no more white barbarians. The earth has grown small, and men are everywhere in close touch. If white civilization goes down, the white race is irretrievably ruined. It will be swamped by the triumphant colored races, who will obliterate the white man by elimination or absorption. What has taken place in Central Asia, once a white and now a brown or yellow land, will take place in Australasia, Europe, and America. Not to-day, nor yet to-morrow; perhaps not for generations; but surely in the end. If the present drift be not changed, we whites are all ultimately doomed. Unless we set our house in order, the doom will sooner or later overtake us all.41
In December 1941, when Japan attacked the American naval station in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, a public conditioned to tales of sneaky immigrants posing as farmers while lying in wait to spring an invasion on the Pacific coast was swept up in a wave of hysteria that was inflamed by military officials who encouraged their fears, as well as a sensational press.
For a war-happy press anxious for a local angle on the conflict, the prospect of a West Coast invasion made great-selling copy. The Los Angeles Times ran headlines like “Jap Boat Flashes Message Ashore” and “Caps on Japanese Tomato Plants Point to Air Base.”42 Pretty soon, everyone was getting into the act. Reports of “signals” being sent out from shore to mysterious unknown Japanese boats offshore began flowing in. One widely circulated legend came from someone in Hawaii who heard a dog somewhere along the Oahu coast and thought it was barking in Morse code to an offshore spy ship.43
In the Seattle area, the stories were similarly ridiculous. “Arrows of Fire Aim at Seattle” shouted the front-page headline of the Seattle Times on December 10. It told of fields in the Port Angeles area, between Seattle and the Pacific Ocean on the Olympic Peninsula, that had been set afire by Japanese farmers in a shape resembling an arrow when viewed from the air; ostensibly, the arrow pointed to the Seattle shipyards and airplane-manufacturing plants, a likely target for incoming bombers. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer blared a similar front-page story the next morning. Neither paper carried any subsequent stories about the fires—which investigators soon determined had been set by white men who were clearing land.44
Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, the elderly commander of the West Coast forces, encouraged these fears when he wasn’t insisting on them. However, his clamorous appeals for devoting badly needed troops for the defense of the West Coast were dismissed by War Department officials who knew better; to the planners there, preparing an offensive army for operations in Europe and the Pacific, such requests were self-indulgent wastes of their time.45
This did not slow DeWitt, who began leading a charge to have all persons of Japanese descent removed from the Pacific coast. As it happened, West Coast politicians were eager to follow suit, and after congressional hearings were held, it was decided that every Japanese person on the coast would be rounded up and shipped to a new location in the interior. The decisive factor was a report issued by DeWitt, who declared the need to do so a matter of national security:
It therefore follows that along the vital Pacific Coast over 112,000 potential enemies, of Japanese extraction, are at large today. There are indications that these are organized and ready for concerted action at a favorable opportunity. The very fact that no sabotage has taken place to date is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken.46
Two months later, every Japanese American along that corridor—indeed, some 110,000 of them—had been rounded up and placed in a concentration camp for the duration of the war.
________
Shortly before Russia’s defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, a pamphlet republishing a series of articles purporting to be the minutes of a late-nineteenth-century gathering of world Jewish leaders began appearing in Moscow and elsewhere. Titled The Protocols of the Seven Elders of Zion, it claimed to reveal a massive plot by Jews to gradually seize control of the world and destroy Western civilization.
It was a hoax concocted by czarist secret police for the purpose of whipping up hatred of Jews and pogroms against them, since monarchists blamed Jews for their defeat at the hands of the Japanese. In fact, the text was a confabulation of previous texts, some of it straight-up plagiarism of a satire by Maurice Joly titled Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu. But it was ingenious in its construction, just vague enough to lack verifiability, but specific and counterintuitive in ways that made the text seem real to gullible readers. And as it emerged, there have been millions of those.47
Among them was Henry Ford. Already having demonstrated an inclination toward anti-Semitism, in 1920 the car-making magnate ordered the Michigan newspaper he owned to begin publishing the Protocols in serialized installments titled “The International Jew.” When it was finished, he collected them into a five-volume set with the same title and sold them for $5 each at Ford car dealerships. He sold thousands of copies.48
Ford’s sponsorship of the text created a global demand for it, and translations appeared throughout Europe, including in Germany, where it was promptly adopted as a core text of the young National Socialist Party, better known as the Nazis. Adolf Hitler, the party’s leader, cited the text regularly in his speeches and later wrote in his book Mein Kampf that even though the Times of London had exposed the Protocols as a hoax as early as 1921, “the important thing is that with positively terrifying certainty they reveal the nature and activity of the Jewish people and expose their inner contexts as well as their ultimate final aims.”49
Hitler’s anti-Semitism was a central aspect of his fascist politics, and as his regime became further entrenched in power in the 1930s, the more actively it pursued his goal of eradicating Jews from German and European society altogether. Combined with his program of lebensraum—seizing territory from other European states and “liquidating” its occupants in order to create more “living space” for pure white German Aryans—the end result became known as the Holocaust, the mass killing campaign that used both deadly mobile assassination units and concentration camps to manufacture death on a genocidal level. By the end of World War II and Hitler’s defeat, he had killed more than six million Jews, along with a couple million more members of other targeted ethnic groups, particularly Roma, as well as homosexuals and political opponents of the fascist regime.
After the war, the Protocols became a banned text in most of Europe and elsewhere, though it could continue to be found in dark corners of the American publishing world where laws prevented it from being banned, but shame had driven it underground. It remained a core text of the remnant far-right movements in the United States, particularly the Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi Party, and later far-right groups such as the Aryan Nations and the National Alliance.
By the 2000s, even these ideologues were willing to acknowledge the Protocols as a forgery, but as with Hitler, that fact seemed irrelevant to them. Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke acknowledged in 2014 that the Protocols were fiction, though true like other great novels like 1984 and Brave New World: “Although the characters and storyline in both those works are ‘fiction,’ the idea which underlay both those books was most certainly fact. Thus, they were works of ‘fiction’—just like the Protocols of Zion.”50
________
It was going to be just a routine business flight. When Kenneth Arnold took off from the airport in Chehalis, Washington, with his little CallAir Model A airplane on June 24, 1947, en route to Yakima on the other side of the Cascade Mountains, things were business as usual until he neared Mount Rainier and spotted a row of flying objects.
They appeared to him to be tracking his rate of speed, about 100 miles per hour, and at times well outpaced him. He later described the objects as being like “flying discs” or “saucers.” When he reached Yakima, he told everyone he could about what he had seen, and soon the story was in all the papers around the country. Headlines dubbed them “flying saucers.”51
Thus began the enduring mystery of unidentified flying objects, aka UFOs. For much of the 1950s and 1960s, the objects spotted by Arnold suddenly were seen seemingly everywhere else in the world as well, by people whose stories were usually less credible and more fantastic with each sighting. People produced photos of “flying saucers” that later turned out to be thrown hubcaps or simply bad retouching jobs.52
The sensation spread to Hollywood, which produced science-fiction thrillers like The Day the Earth Stood Still, in which an alien emissary arrives on a mission of peace in a disc-shaped spaceship, or conversely Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, in which aliens from a dying planet attack Washington, D.C., but are eventually defeated. The airborne saucers remained a sci-fi stereotype for decades afterward, with featured roles in television series like The Invaders and Lost in Space in the 1960s, and even into the 1990s in the alien-invader movie epic Independence Day.
The mystery surrounding the flying saucers never subsided, and speculation about their possible origins not only grew outsized, but eventually metastasized into conspiracy theories, especially as government officials continued to deny their existence and to debunk the claims of their existence with regularity. Combined with random reports that government officials had in fact encountered aliens, or perhaps had alien corpses or other evidence of their existence held in secret, the legend grew into a cottage industry devoted to “exposing the truth” about UFOs.
A key component of the legend included the idea that a cadre of government agents who wear dark business suits and sunglasses as their uniforms—known generically as “men in black”—was primarily responsible for suppression of this “truth.” Eventually, Hollywood made use of this as well, with sci-fi television series like The X Files and movie franchises like Men in Black depicting the exploits of these same government agents in a mostly heroic light.
Another infamous public event—the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963—had similarly sparked a raft of conspiracy theories, especially after the official investigation into the event concluded it had been the act of a single man, despite seemingly contrary evidence. The high levels of uncertainty were piqued by the intense speculation about who was behind the death, with suspicion coming to rest on everyone from the CIA and J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI, to mob bosses angry about Kennedy’s anti-gangster policies, and seemingly everything in between. Many of these conspiracy theories were laden with similar tales of sunglasses-wearing men in black suppressing evidence and quietly “suiciding” people who spoke up.53
The industry around the UFO phenomenon never entirely went away. The conspiracism it engendered on radio programs like Art Bell’s nationally syndicated Coast to Coast AM show and in multiple pseudo-documentaries and sensational books readily blended over into other theories suggesting that nefarious government or corporate forces were secretly conspiring to harm or enslave the public in other, often health-related, ways. In particular, the belief that the government had secret cures for cancers locked away and deliberately suppressed or that it was engaged in a variety of plots that were slowly poisoning the population—through fluoridation of the water supply, various food supplements, vaccinations, or even in chemicals in the contrails left behind by jets—became part of the same industry, and often their theories intersected with those involving UFOs or even old anti-Semitic theories.
In the 1980s, for instance, a conspiracy theorist named William Cooper, who in addition to publishing books ran a radio show based in Arizona, published a kind of all-encompassing, hypercomplex metatheory titled Behold a Pale Horse. It proposed that JFK’s assassination, along with a number of other infamous mysteries, were secretly the doings of Illuminati—who, moreover, were not people at all, but nefarious invading aliens from another planet who were able to disguise themselves by appearing to be human. It also proposed that the Protocols were produced by the Illuminati and that one could easily read them as a manual for an alien takeover of the Earth.54
Cooper’s book and radio show, as it happened, are credited with playing a major role in the early development of the “Patriot” militia movement of the 1990s.55
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There was another major conspiracy-minded movement of the 1950s that had a lasting impact, though it was aligned politically with the far right of American politics from the beginning: namely, the anti-Communist movement that emerged from the aftermath of World War II and the ensuing “Red Scare” led by Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin.
An earlier Red Scare, between 1917 and 1920 that arose in the wake of the Russian Revolution, was similarly constructed around fears of an international Bolshevik conspiracy with designs on American democracy.56 It had produced several notable outrages against the Constitution, particularly the passage of the Sedition Act of 1918, which targeted immigrants as potential terrorists, and the so-called Palmer Raids, in which federal authorities rounded up and deported suspected leftist radicals from the Italian and Jewish communities. However, it had been rather short-lived, cooling down especially after the attorney general for whom the raids were named issued a national warning about an attempted coup against the government on May Day 1920 that turned out to be completely false.57
The Red Scare that reverberates in American politics even today began taking off in 1947, shortly after Russia and the United States ended their wartime alliance and began the series of mutual hostilities that soon came to be known as the Cold War. This time, there was a round of public hysteria generated in the press about possible Communist spies handing over American military secrets, particularly the recipe for a nuclear bomb. This fear intensified in 1949, when the Soviets successfully tested their first such weapon, and then became feverish in 1950, when a State Department employee named Alger Hiss was arrested and convicted of spying for Russia and a physicist associated with America’s own nuclear bomb was exposed for passing key information to the Soviets. The couriers included an American couple named Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who eventually were executed for spying.58
The same year, Senator McCarthy spoke to a gathering of Republican ladies in Wheeling, West Virginia, and brandished a sheet of paper upon which, he declared, were the names of known traitors working for the U.S. government: “I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department,” he told them.
The remarks sparked a flurry of national headlines for the senator and thrust him into a leading role among the demagogues who began making hay from the hysteria, which included congressmen like Richard Nixon of California, who served on the House Un-American Activities Committee. Almost overnight, McCarthy became one of the best-known politicians in America and began using his new fame to smear his targets and political opponents. He campaigned that fall for a Republican challenger to one of his Democratic Senate colleagues, claiming that the incumbent—who went on to lose by forty thousand votes—was “protecting Communists” and “shielding traitors.”59
In 1953, McCarthy became chairman of the relatively mundane Senate Committee on Government Operations, but he managed to twist the investigatory powers of one of its subcommittees into a stage-managed investigation of Communists operating within the U.S. government. He hired a ruthless attorney named Roy Cohn as his chief counsel, and they set about making life hell for a number of government employees, first at the federally owned Voice of America radio network, then at the State Department. Meanwhile, a blacklist produced by the House Un-American Activities Committee condemned hundreds of people working in the entertainment industry in Hollywood, including a large number of well-known actors, directors, and screenwriters, to nearly a decade of unemployment.60
McCarthy met his Waterloo, however, when he set out to investigate the U.S. Army in 1954. His Senate subcommittee’s hearings were broadcast live on national television, which was still in its infancy. Though McCarthy exploited the heavy exposure for the opportunity to accuse a number of people of aiding the Communist Party, in the end it did not serve McCarthy well: the more people saw of him, the more they came to see him as a reckless bully and a liar.61
The culminative incident generally credited with ending his career as a demagogue came when the army’s lead attorney, Joseph Welch, responded angrily to McCarthy’s insinuation that a young Boston lawyer was also a Communist by saying: “Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”62
At the end of the year, the Senate voted to censure McCarthy. Afterward, he became a pariah in Washington and in the press, especially as he began to drink more than he already had. He died in 1957 from liver failure attributed to his alcoholism.
However, the legacy of the Red Scare remained vibrant and active for the better part of the 1950s and even into the 1960s, as the Cold War proceeded apace. The paranoia, in particular, took on a life of its own thanks to the rise of organizations like the John Birch Society.
Founded in 1958 by candy magnate Robert Welch, the JBS—or “Birchers,” as they became better known—immediately picked up McCarthy’s cudgel and began beating a broad range of American politicians with it, accusing them of being “soft” on Communism or even “card-carrying members of the Communist Party,” as Welch was fond of labeling his opponents, including President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who he described as “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.”63
However, the smears were only the tip of the scapegoating spear that was the Birchers’ main enterprise: the real heart of the organization was its conspiracism, which distinguished it from other anti-Communist conservatives, particularly the William F. Buckley contingent that denounced the Society and ridiculed them as “far removed from common sense.”64
According to Welch, “both the U.S. and Soviet governments are controlled by the same furtive conspiratorial cabal of internationalists, greedy bankers, and corrupt politicians. If left unexposed, the traitors inside the U.S. government would betray the country’s sovereignty to the United Nations for a collectivist New World Order, managed by a ‘one-world socialist government.’” Birchers developed a fixation with the UN, whose “real nature,” they claimed, “is to build a One World Government.” All around the nation, particularly in areas where the society was popular, billboards sprung up with bright blue letters: “Get US Out! of the United Nations.”65
The society became one of the earliest progenitors of health-related conspiracy theories. First, in the 1950s, many Birchers became involved in protesting the use of fluoride in public water supplies (a health measure that was just then gaining prominence). They argued that it was a secret Communist conspiracy that would surreptitiously inflict a host of ills on an unsuspecting American public.66
Perhaps the most incisive portrayal of the John Birch Society’s mindset was delivered in a brutal black-comedic satire, Stanley Kubrick’s 1963 film Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, about a Bircherite general who sets off the end of the world because of his paranoid beliefs. Trapped in his offices with a hapless British attaché played by Peter Sellers, the cigar-chomping General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) explains why he sent an entire wing of nuclear-armed bombers to attack Russia: “I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.” Fluoridation, Ripper explained, was “the most monstrously conceived and dangerous Communist plot we have ever had to face.”
The society revived that tradition in the 1970s, when it began promoting claims that an apricot-seed derivative called laetrile was a secret cure for cancer that had been deliberately suppressed by the Federal Drug Administration. The reality was that not only were there no known clinical benefits for cancer patients using the drug in tests, but consuming it actually put them at risk of poisoning from cyanide, which laetrile can release in humans when digested. Nonetheless, the JBS became involved in pro-laetrile campaigns in at least nine states, while the pro-laetrile organization “Committee for Freedom of Choice in Cancer Therapy” had a board almost entirely comprised of people with official ties to the society.67
Through the 1960s and 1970s, the society—which largely remained on the fringe of the national conversation due to their marginalization by mainstream pundits—mostly recruited new members with surreptitious evening dinners that ended with filmstrip presentations and literature, often of leading local businessmen, with varying degrees of success. It was a slow recruitment strategy.
Their numbers didn’t flourish, but the society’s quiet influence remained steady over the years, particularly in rural areas. By the 1980s, they had largely vanished from the political scene—but the roots they had created in the preceding decades came springing back to life in a new form: militias.68