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