It's the Hate, Stupid

I didn't go out into the world to talk about conspiracy theory until after I wrote my books. Like many autodidacts, I felt a little put in my place by how much more than me most of the professional pundits I encountered knew, but also disappointed (and sometimes outraged) by how wrong and complacent some of them seemed. One thing that I hadn't sufficiently considered was how often even the most off-the-wall conspiracy theorists get at least one predicate right--that the government lies and is not to be trusted. Look closer and you will almost always see the evidence of shadowy others pulling strings. Or sometimes not that shadowy--money is very powerful and most of the time it isn't the least bit occult. Politicians tend to put themselves up for sale.Something I think I did get right is that the philosopher's stone of conspiracism--the catalyst that turns magical thinking into theory, hallucinatory sex fantasies into politics--is race hatred. But even so, I didn't take it seriously enough. I was writing when Obama was still in office, and my frame of reference was historical: Robert Welch and the Birchers, Henry Ford and the Protocols of Zion, the anti-Masons, Knownothingism, and so on. I assumed that a lot of the racism in our own context was opportunistic and performative--a convenient button to push for people whose core agenda was money. In retrospect, I honestly don't know what I was thinking.If you want to understand Trump, look to Birtherism. If you want to understand Birtherism, it's about race hate. Racism (and anti-Papism) are America's original sins. And we are reaping a Biblical punishment for them.