Author Interview: Jesse Walker on 'The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory'

Reason magazine books editor Jesse Walker is author of the recent book, The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory (HarperCollins, $25.99), which reaches back to the earliest days of American history to examine how conspiracy theories take hold and what kind of influence they have on politics when they fail to fizzle out.

Acknowledging that his new book draws partial inspiration from and is partially a reply to Richard Hofstadter's famous monograph, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Walker explained in an interview with me last month at the Cato Institute that The United States of Paranoia “grew out of a lot of things.”

'Folklore of conspiracy thinking'
He had “been writing stories that touched on these issues for many years. At one point in the book, I quote from interviews I did way back in 1995 for a magazine article.”

In particular, Walker said, he “wanted to explore the folklore of conspiracy thinking in America and just what we can learn from these stories – even the ones that aren't true [and] hat they say about the anxieties and the experiences of the people who believe them.”

Walker acknowledged that conspiracy theories and urban legends “overlap,” but they are not the same thing.

“The two big differences are that sometimes a conspiracy theory is true and, by definition, no urban legend is true,” while “not all urban legends involve conspiracies, but many do.”

He pointed out that “one rich source of material in the book was just looking at the works by the sociologists and anthropologists who collect urban legends and that sort of folklore.”

Anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism
Similarly, while some conspiracy theories have anti-Catholic or anti-Semitic roots, not all do.

“There are a lot of anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, which is not to say that anyone who believes in a conspiracy theory shares those bigotries,” Walker explained.

“Of those conspiracy theories that involve scapegoating a group, the three that seem to have the most potent influence in American history were those involving Catholics, blacks, or Indians. Obviously, there are also ones involving Jews, gays, liberals, conservatives, and others, but those were the big three.”

On the other hand, he said, “if I were writing a history of European paranoia, anti-Semitism would be much closer to the core,” adding that there are “a number of anti-Semites in the book,” which focuses on American history.

Even little-known and generally forgotten conspiracy theories can re-emerge unexpectedly, Walker said.

Some of them “will continue to be around and mutate and find new forms. I never would have guessed in the 1980s,” for instance, “that there would be all sorts of rap lyrics about the Illuminati” two decades later.

At my prompting, Walker commented on some well-known conspiracy theories involving President Barack Obama, the AIDS virus, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Birtherism
One common conspiracy theory of the past few years has been based on the claim that President Obama was not born in the United States. This has earned the sobriquet “birtherism,” and includes such elements that Obama was born in Kenya and his official birth certificate from Hawaii is a fake.

Jesse Walker

“There's a lot to unpack there,” Walker said about that theory.

In the book, he said, he gives three reasons for why “birtherism has taken hold and even has believers now, even though it's pretty hard to make the case for it being true at this point.”

The first is a “desire for a magic bullet, something that can win you a political victory without the pain of political persuasion. It's worth noting,” Walker explained, “that birtherism initially caught on among the diehard supporters of Hillary Clinton during the primaries in 2008 before it migrated to the right.”

A second reason “is the fear of the foreign.”

If someone is “afraid of foreign Muslims and [doesn't] like the president, it's easy to be attracted to the idea of the president being foreign and/or a Muslim.”

In general, he continued, “if people who are uncomfortable with the idea of America as a multicultural nation, to them, the President is metaphorically foreign for all sorts of reasons and a conspiracy theory is very good at making the metaphoric into the concrete.”

The third reason, Walker said, is that birtherism is “a way to maintain your respect for the presidency while rejecting a president. If you can say, 'he's a usurper, pretender to the throne' – you actually see these sort of royalist metaphors in a lot of birther literature” – the birther can claim respect for the office if not for the man.

Walker added that he is “not saying that every birther subscribes to all three of those. Those groups overlap.” There are people for whom none of those reasons fit, “but those are three themes that often come up in the birther literature.”

AIDS created by U.S. government?
Another conspiracy that emerged relatively recently was the idea that the U.S. government created the AIDS virus.

There a lot of different AIDS theories, Walker said, but the one he addresses in his book “is the idea that white doctors were injecting black babies with AIDS. You might remember that rumor in the '80s.”

That story is “obviously not true,” he noted, but still “it's easy to see how it could catch on among people who have experienced a long history of high-handed or abusive treatment from the white medical establishment, including some genuine conspiracies, like the Tuskegee Experiment. That sort of lays the ground work for believing other conspiracy theories.”

9/11 truthers
Those who refuse to believe that Islamic-extremist hijackers destroyed the World Trade Center by crashing jet planes into the Twin Towers are known as “9/11 truthers.” They often say that the U.S. government engineered the collapse of the buildings in order to trigger a war and reduce Americans' civil liberties.

The question of 9/11 trutherism is “one that has people have adopted that for so many reasons, I really hate to reduce it to any one or two.”

Sometimes, Walker pointed out, “people say that trutherism is a paralyzing idea because everything is stacked against you. The flip side is that you just have to worry about what's happening in Washington not trying to disentangle what's going on in foreign lands.”

That is not, however, “the only reason that trutherism catches on,” and he addresses some of those other possibilities in his book.

As it happens, Jesse Walker was also a guest of Coy Barefoot on WCHV-FM's “Inside Charlottesville” on August 27, talking about The United States of Paranoia.

(This article is based on two previously published pieces on Examiner.com.)

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'Shattered Mirrors,' by Monroe Price

This book review first appeared in The Washington Times on Monday, September 25, 1989.

Can our civil rights survive AIDS?

SHATTERED MIRRORS: OUR SEARCH FOR IDENTITY AND COMMUNITY IN THE AIDS ERA
By Monroe Price
Harvard University Press
$19.95, l60 pages
REVIEWED BY RICHARD SINCERE

In “Shattered Mirrors: Our Search for Identity and Community in the AIDS Era,” Monroe Price, dean of the law school at Yeshiva University, takes an interdisciplinary approach to explore values and behavior during the AIDS years.

Though the topic is specifically AIDS, this slim volume actually contains a wide-ranging reflection upon the sources of contemporary American culture. It also focuses on the contradictory forces that influence our society and the paradoxes that ensue.

Mr. Price argues that AIDS has had an irreversible, if sometimes unapparent, impact upon our culture. To some this might seem to be an irrefutable assertion. Indeed, since millions of people may be carrying the AIDS virus (HIV) and many thousands of those are likely to become ill and die from the disease, the reverberations from AIDS are being felt widely and deeply However, Mr. Price’s argument rests upon an assumption that AIDS, either as an illness or as a social phenomenon, has been much more pervasive than is actually the case.

Because of this faulty assumption, one of the two main themes explored in” Shattered Mirrors” — whether the First Amendment can survive the health crisis — seems misguided. The other major theme, which, appropriately for a lawyer, focuses on the Constitution’s guarantees of equal protection (primarily under the 14th Amendment), travels on much firmer ground.

Mr. Price asserts that “the AIDS crisis has jolted our confidence” in the concept of the marketplace of ideas, which ‘gives the nod to the winner in ideology in cultural styles, and in advocacy of various modes of consumption” (that is, in political speech, artistic and literary speech, and commercial speech). Insofar as this marketplace of ideas is “unfettered, it has produced cultural ideas and habits that are a risk to the public’s health.”

Because the government has seen fit to offer advice and counsel on personal behavior during the AIDS crisis, and may in the future, if it has not already done so, join forces with organized religious groups in an effort to influence cultural norms, Mr. Price believes that First Amendment freedoms of speech and of the press are threatened.

This assertion deserves much scrutiny, Certainly, we already have seen some self-censorship in the media: James Bond has fewer ladies to love, condoms are used to comic effect in movies and on television, rock musicians sing about delaying sexual gratification. There has been, fortunately, no attempt by the state to coerce such censorship. It has been a marketing decision. If Hollywood believes that sex doesn’t sell as well as it used to, let it act on that belief. Hollywood could, after all, be entirely mistaken and too cautious.

The government’s entry into the AIDS debate, and into an educational role (aimed both at children and adults), is not significantly different from the government’s role in public discussions or education on other issues.

To support his assertions that AIDS poses a threat to traditional First Amendment values and protections, Mr. Price invokes an “AIDS-as-war” simile that simply does not wash. AIDS is not comparable to the Black Death, to the influenza epidemic of 1918, or to belligerent attacks by a foreign power. The disease is quite difficult to transmit, far less contagious than influenza or the bubonic plague.

Indeed, the numbers of people affected —at least in the United States, which is the sole focus of this study — are far narrower than such comparisons suppose. There has not been, and if Michael Fumento is correct, there will not be, the long-anticipated breakout of the disease into the larger population beyond the two groups that have been primarily affected, homosexual men and intravenous drug users.

Because of this, however, Mr. Price has a much stronger argument when he says that the AIDS crisis poses a threat to the Constitution’s equal-protection guarantees. Two groups of people, long marginalized by society turn out to be those most affected by a deadly disease. There are attempts by other citizens — including national leaders — to play upon archaic prejudices in order to isolate these groups even more.

Featuring Congressional Record screeds by Rep. William Dannemeyer of California and Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina, this movement takes special aim at homosexual men, mostly because — unlike intravenous drug users, who tend to come from the underclass and the politically irrelevant — the homosexual community is large, organized and affluent. To the New Right, the homosexual community and its allies pose a threat to hallowed values. Add to this the hysteria whipped up by political cult leader Lyndon LaRouche, and we have a recipe for a civil-liberties disaster.

These trends explain why, as Mr. Price argues, “one of the greatest dangers of AIDS to the national consciousness is the threat to the principle, so arduously achieved, that baseless discrimination should be officially condemned and that pnvate biases must not have public expression.”

In a passage that has relevance far beyond the realm of public-health concerns, Mr Price notes that “the constitutional notion of equal protection is complex, though the term is often invoked. We do not live in a system in which some constitutional talisman tells us the ‘right’ method of distributing wealth or health.

“Ours is, for better or for worse, s society that presumes, indeed thrives on, inequities that arise not out of the denial of opportunity itself but out of the differences in the way opportunity is seized. We know that the Constitution does not mean that every person will fare equally well, Yet, when we evaluate a course of government action — at least according to Constitutional traditions — we must ask whether a higher level of scrutiny ought to be exercised because of the very nature of the risk groups affected by the AIDS crisis.”

Citing Justice Harlan Stone, Mr. Price asserts that just as racial minorities can be identified if they are targets of discrimination. “those at risk of obtaining AIDS are subject to the kind of ‘prejudice against discrete and insular minorities’ that tends to affect the operation of political processes in a manner contrary to our basic values.” Mr. Price’s warning from all this: “We should be particularly suspicious when government approach disadvantages a group which, for longstanding reasons, those in control of the legislative process may seek to injure.”

As might be expected, Mr. Price praises the recommendation from the Watkins Commission — the President’s Commission on the Human Immunodeficiency Syndrome — that Congress should forbid discrimination against those who have AIDS or who are perceived to carry the AIDS virus. President Bush has endorsed this approach. It has become clear in recent years that AIDS-phobia has been used as a thin veil to justify anti-homosexual discrimination in areas where such discrimination is patently unjustified. (Indeed, one must wonder if it ever is justified.)

While these legal and constitutional issues make up the core of Monroe Price’s book, the author has collected many readable anecdotes, microportraits of our culture on the cusp of the l990s. Although some of his arguments fall short of expectations, Mr. Price raises a number of questions that deserve further exploration. In fact, one could read this book not as a definitive description of “identity and community in the AIDS era,” but as a memorandum of suggestions for future research.

Richard Sincere is a Washington-based issues analyst and writer.

'And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic'

This book review first appeared in The Washington Times on Wednesday, November 18, 1987.  A slightly different version was published in the New York City Tribune on Wednesday, November 25, 1987.


BOOK REVIEW / Richard Sincere
Uncertain war against a deadly virus


And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic
By Randy Shilts
St. Martin’s Press
$24.95, 630 pages

Considering the age of most victims of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, the only possible analogy is with war — a generation decimated, felled not by bullets but by an insidious virus.

AIDS was a political hot potato even before the disease had a name. In “And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic,” a gripping account of the known history of the virus, veteran journalist Randy Shilts demonstrates how political interest groups fumbled with the issue. Whether this led to the needless deaths of some 21,000 people by 1987 remains to be proven. It is clear, however, that playing politics with human lives can be devastating.

More than any number of back- alley pummelings, the AIDS epidemic has made palpable the deep-seated American animosity toward homosexuals. The evidence is in the response to the epidemic:

In the early ‘80s the National Institutes of Health spent $36,100 of research money per Toxic Shock fatality (it was no longer a mystery disease by then) and $34,841 per Legionnaire’s fatality. In contrast, it spent $3,225 per AIDS death in fiscal 1981 and $8,991 in fiscal 1982.

As a University of California dean remarked early in the epidemic, “at least with AIDS, a lot of undesirable people will be eliminated.”

This blatant bigotry was matched by more subtle remarks. When pressed about AIDS research, former Secretary of Health and Human Services Margaret Heckler noted her concern that it would break out into the “general population” — as though gay men, drug addicts, and poor blacks and Hispanics were an alien population or from another planet.

By May 1987, when President Reagan made his first public speech about AIDS, 36,058 Americans had been diagnosed as having the disease, 20,849 had died and between 1 million and 2 million had been infected. The United States is today the only Western industrialized democracy without a coordinated program to combat AIDS.

It is far too easy to parcel out blame during a crisis. Only historical perspective will verify the accuracy of the charges. Few actors in the AIDS drama escape Mr. Shilts’ scrutiny. He identifies heroes, villains and victims.

The heroes include playwright Larry Kramer and political activist Bill Kraus, who early warned of the dangers of promiscuous behavior and who were ostracized b’ their colleagues for their efforts. They also include the tireless researchers at the national Centers for Disease Control, the Pasteur Institute in Paris and various hospitals around the country.

The political heroes were Democratic Rep. Phillip Burton of California, Republican Sen. Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop and Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary for Health Edward Brandt. As Mr. Shilts writes, these men took the commonsense approach “that attentiveness to the AIDS issue was not determined by whether one was liberal or conservative but by whether one did or didn’t care about the public health.”

Sadly, the villains outnumbered the heroes. Government officials head the list: HHS Secretary Margaret M. Heckler and her spokesmen insisted that AIDS researchers had all the money they needed, even as scientists were sending her detailed memoranda outlining the specific shortfalls in funds, equipment and personnel amounting to tens of millions of dollars; Mr. Shilts presents a convincing case that Mrs. Heckler and the administration lied to the Congress, the press and the public about AIDS research.

Likewise he documents that New York Mayor Edward Koch, his health commissioner David Sencer and Gov. Mario Cuomo refused to support AIDS research or treatment for more than five years into the epidemic, though New York City had more than half the AIDS cases. They, too, lied to the public about their concern, he writes.

The media, particularly the TV networks and the prestige press, deserve even more censure. They simply refused to cover the crisis unless it involved someone other than homosexuals. The big papers ignored shocking reports from the Centers for Disease Control, the Government Accounting Office and the Congressional Research Service. Besides the gay press, only the San Francisco Chronicle covered the epidemic in any depth.

Other villains were the bathhouse owners and paranoid gay political leaders who felt that promiscuous sex was a right to be vigorously defended. Blood banks would not acknowledge the danger AIDS posed to the blood supply. The infamous “Patient Zero,” a French-Canadian flight attendant, was linked with many early AIDS cases, yet continued to have sex with unwitting partners well after he had been diagnosed. And his irresponsible behavior was not unique.

More ambiguous is the case of Dr. Robert Gallo, credited for discovering the AIDS virus, which he dubbed HTLV-III. In this account Dr. Gallo is portrayed as childish and egotistical, refusing to cooperate with fellow scientists and setting back the search for a cure, treatment and a vaccine. The book also says there is substantial evidence that he might not have discovered the AIDS virus at all, but took his specimens from the French researchers who actually did.

The list of victims grows each day and includes Rock Hudson, Liberace, Michael Bennett, Perry Ellis, Willi Smith, Stewart McKinney, Terry Dolan, Roy Cohn and Michel Foucault. Regrettably, Bill Kraus, who fought for AIDS funding and against sexual promiscuity succumbed in early 1986.

Mr. Shilts makes no recommendations and offers no conclusions, but several can be inferred. One is that al if the AIDS crisis demonstrates anything, it is the need for a substantial public health emergency fund. AIDS caught everyone by surprise — scientists, doctors, public officials — and it can happen again. Research scientists and physicians should not have to fight tooth and nail for basic equipment in the early stages of a medical crisis. The Capitol Hill appropriations process must respond expeditiously or see thousands die.

The current government response shows no sign of improvement. The conflict between the stolid pragmatism of Surgeon General Koop and the naivete of Education Secretary William Bennett, whose solution seems to extend no further than advocating chastity, continues. And the petty squabbling within the Presidential AIDS Commission promises to destroy that body before its work begins. The band still plays on.

Richard Sincere Jr. is a Washington-based policy analyst and writer.