David Samuels' Guide to the Land of Conspiracism

Tucker Carlson probably isn't a woke subversive, but this pro-Trump pundit has some valid points

Jackie II by Andy Warhol.

In “Op Nation,” an alternately smart and obtuse essay in the Jewish magazine Tablet, David Samuels interrogates the American discourse about conspiracy theorists and conspiracy with provocative claims and unusual nuance. He’s a pro-Trump writer worth reading.

Conspiracism, Samuels argues, is foundational to these United States.

“The American Revolution, which led to the founding of the American nation, was rooted in imaginings of secret plots by the British crown against traditional English liberties by colonials,” he writes. “… Their response was to throw off English rule and enshrine protection of the traditional liberties of Englishmen in the Bill of Rights, which was appended to the founding document of the new American nation— thereby institutionalizing popular conspiracism as a foundational condition for the exercise of American state power.”

At the same time, fear of conspiracies is an instrument of control. He catalogs how Americans have deployed conspiracism to advance their political goals over the past 200 years.

“Deadly viruses that may or may not have originated from labs in China; Islamist terror plots; pedophile rings; foreign hackers; school shooters; networks of communist spies stealing atomic secrets; Jewish and Italian anarchists from Europe plotting to assassinate the president of the United States and leading industrialists; Northern abolitionists; Southern secessionists; Freemasons; papists; Tories lurking just over the northern border and waiting to invade and sack Washington, D.C., in concert with the British army — all of these refer to phenomena that were at once and the same time entirely real and also used as excuses to abridge or abrogate the individual rights and freedoms guaranteed to every American…[emphasis added]

So while “conspiracy theorists” are routinely derided, he notes that conspiracism is baked into the dynamics of American politics.