What Makes Conspiracy Theorists Tick?

Circumstance I suppose. My life has been remarkably ordinary in many ways and at least two-thirds of it was lived during times when we trusted our media sources. It’s hard for me to feel my government is evil—corrupt perhaps, even devious and unprincipled at times—but hardly evil.

And yet there are those who suppose as much

And I search for reasons, because I count myself a reasonable man. Having spent the best part of the last quarter-century writing about America’s social and political history, I find plenty of seeds for the growing mistrust of government that blooms into conspiracy theories.

I mark the Vietnam War as the beginning of that mistrust

When the French quit Indochina in 1954, the US assumed financial and military support for the South Vietnamese state. No one asked my permission nor explained why. Something to do with dominoes, but it was never sold to America as being worth it. Kennedy and Johnson lied their way through a ‘police action’ (it was never declared a war, we d…