How America’s Rich Legacy of Fear and Hatred Fuels the Conspiracy Theories of Today
23 Jun
Politics

How America’s Rich Legacy of Fear and Hatred Fuels the Conspiracy Theories of Today

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Politics tamfitronics This article was adapted from The Politics of Fear: The Peculiar Persistence of American Paranoia. It appears at TPM by arrangement with Vintage Books, animprint of The Knopf Doubleday Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. If America’s paranoid style is homegrown and unique, conspiracy theory is universal. By the early 1920s, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion — the Beethoven’s Ninth of conspiracy theory — had been translated into German, Polish, French, Italian, and English. Its first Arab translation appeared in 1925, and it was published in Portuguese and Spanish in 1930. Even after some of its German readers acted on its lessons and exterminated millions of Jewish men, women,...
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America’s first Black astronaut candidate finally flew. Now it’s time to make more
19 Jun
Top Stories

America’s first Black astronaut candidate finally flew. Now it’s time to make more

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Top Stories Tamfitronics Ed Dwight thought he would be an astronaut six decades ago, back when President John F. Kennedy’s administration, in its push for the moon, realized that the impact of America reaching our closest celestial neighbor would be magnified greatly if the crew included a person of color.“Why don’t we put the first non-white man in space?” Edward Murrow, Kennedy’s director of the U.S. Information Agency, wrote to NASA administrator James Webb in 1961, just five months after the Soviet Union put a person, Yuri Gagarin, into space for the first time ever. “If your boys were to enroll and train a qualified Negro and then fly him in whatever vehicle is available, we could retell our whole space effort to the whole non-white world, which is most of it.”The climb was steep....
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