Conspiracy theories are like opinions. Everybody’s got one and they all stink … except yours, of course. Jack D. Ripper’s paranoia about fluoride lampooned by director Stanley Kubrick stands out as the iconic takedown of the anti-communist and Bircher paranoia of the 1950s and 1960s. Such ideas feel today like vintage collectibles from another time. Half a century from now our own conspiracy theories will possess some of the same nostalgic patina.
Except they never went away entirely. Like men’s ties growing wider then thinner, it is only a matter of time before yesterday’s fashion becomes fashionable once more.
David Corn reveals at Mother Jones that among the notions entertained by Georgia’s Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene are Bircher ideas of the sort William F. Buckley sought to “drum out” of the conservative movement at the time Kubrick was filming his classic satire. As onetime national director of Family America Project, Greene helped moderate the group’s Facebook page featuring “death threats against Democrats, bigoted attacks on the Obamas and others, and assorted conspiracy theories,” Corn writes:
Despite Buckley’s efforts, the conspiracist legacy of the Birchers has continued to find adherents on the right and among Republicans. Greene’s loony paranoia—calling the Parkland, Sandy Hook, and Las Vegas shootings “false flag” operations, claiming Jewish space lasers caused California wildfires—is nothing new. It’s the continuation of a trend that has infected and at times been exploited by the Republican Party and the broader conservative movement for over half a century. (Look at Trump and birtherism and his rants about the deep state.) Last year, as Peters and the Family America Project protested lockdowns and mask-wearing, the group’s Facebook page spread a meme citing something called “The Plan,” which suggested that unidentified forces would use COVID to deploy UN troops to take control of US cities.
The left is hardly immune. At New Age trade shows of the 1990s one could find charts tracking connections between the Bilderbergers, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the supposed Illuminati. Or hear tales of alien technologies secretly exploited by the government at Area 51.
Today vaccine paranoia is back. Anti-mask sentiment has morphed into anti-vaccine protests, reports the New York Times:
An out-of-work stand-up comic originally from New Jersey. An actor and conservative podcast host dressed in a white lab coat. A gadfly who has run several unsuccessful campaigns for Congress in Los Angeles. And at least a few who had been in Washington the day of the Capitol riot.
They were among the motley crew of so-called anti-vaxxers who recently converged on the entrance of the mass vaccination site at Dodger Stadium to protest distribution of a coronavirus vaccine.
The loosely formed coalition represents a new faction in California’s long-established anti-vaccine movement. And the protest was the latest sign that Californians have become the unlikely standard-bearers for aggressive criticism of the vaccines even as virus cases continue to spread in the state.
About 50 protesters carrying signs reading “Don’t be a lab rat!” and “Covid = Scam” arrived at the entrance to the Dodger Stadium vaccination site last week. The Los Angeles Fire Department shut down the public operation for about an hour as a precauation because bullying, threatening, and intimidation of never goes out of style. The Covid-19 crisis has produced “an uptick in confrontational and threatening tactics,” the Times reports. Protesters allege firefighters overreacted.
“Anti-vaccine attitudes are as old as vaccines themselves,” said Richard M. Carpiano, who is a professor of public policy and sociology at the University of California, Riverside, and who studies the anti-vaccine movement. “The other thing that gets tied into this is the wellness movement, this idea that natural is better. There’s a broader kind of mistrust of Big Pharma, and about medical care and medical professions. There is this real market for discontent that these groups can really kind of seize upon.”
There is plenty of distrust to go around, some of it justified, some of it just insane.
Safety tip: Crude oil is 100 percent natural but I would not advise drinking it for what ails ya.