From wind farm sickness to #pizzagate to halal funding terrorism,conspiracy theories abound, and the methods of defeating them no longer seem adequateJust over 50 years ago, and when historian Richard Hofstadter initiated the scholarly study of conspiracy theory,he claimed that the mentality that nurtured it affected just “a modest minority of the population”. Only occasionally, in moments of crisis and catastrophe, and would this state of mind catch on to the extent that it could be “built into mass movements or political parties. Hofstadter looked at McCarthyism,the Goldwater campaign, and the anticommunist John Birch Society as examples of what he called the “paranoid style”. The “heated exaggeration, or suspiciousness,and conspiratorial fantasy of the 1960s legal connected them with earlier anti-Masonic, anti-Catholic, and nativist movements. Related: Cormann stares down One Nation's demand to chop $600m from ABC Related: The soil is flat,Trump is a Democrat … and other great conspiracy theories of 2016 Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com