The summers' blockbuster thriller! An investigative reporter unwittingly overhears a conversation between two men in a parking garage late at night in Washington, D.C. His subsequent life-threatening investigation propels him down a dark and twisted path leading to the Alliance, a rogue, extremely powerful and highly secretive organization that has been plotting for four decades to overthrow the Democratic Party. Forty years later they may have succeeded by orchestrating the strange whirlwind rise and eventual election of what everyone believes is the most liberal Democratic President in the history of the Country, Barack Obama, or is he? With the fate of the most powerful nation on Earth hanging in the balance and its two huge political machines set to win or lose everything can one man stay alive long enough to uncover the truth and get it out into the open? Time is running out as he races to save the Nation, its political system and its people from impending doom.

This book analyses the discursive weaponization of conspiracy theories. In an era where truth and fiction converge, nativist populist leaders wield conspiracy theories as political weapons. This text examines the interplay between populism and conspiracism, probing their impact on democratic processes and exploring their broader political implications. The work dissects three predominant conspiracy theories: The Eurabia theory in Europe, the Deep State in the United States, and anti-Western narratives in Russia. It shows their evolution from fringe ideas to mainstream political tools and reveals the leaders’ triple strategy: Constructing external threats, demonizing internal elites, and positioning themselves as protectors of the ‘true people.’ It also examines how digital media facilitates the spread of these narratives, undermining institutional trust and fuelling extremism. Weaponizing Conspiracy Theories serves as a guide to recognize and navigate the distorted realities reshaping our world. It offers essential insights into the complex dynamics of 21st-century global politics. The author argues that to properly understand the functions of contemporary politics, into which conspiracy theories and populism are now deeply integrated, we must both examine the impact that conspiracy theories have on people’s understandings of the world and how populist politicians can appeal to these beliefs. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of conspiracy theories, populism, and contemporary politics.

Conspiracy theories are inevitable in complex human societies. And while they have always been with us, their ubiquity in our political discourse is nearly unprecedented. Their salience has increased for a variety of reasons including the increasing access to information among ordinary people, a pervasive sense of powerlessness among those same people, and a widespread distrust of elites. Working in combination, these factors and many other factors are now propelling conspiracy theories into our public sphere on a vast scale. In recent years, scholars have begun to study this genuinely important phenomenon in a concerted way. In Conspiracy Theories and the People Who Believe Them, Joseph E. Uscinski has gathered forty top researchers on the topic to provide both the foundational tools and the evidence to better understand conspiracy theories in the United States and around the world. Each chapter is informed by three core questions: Why do so many people believe in conspiracy theories? What are the effects of such theories when they take hold in the public? What can or should be done about the phenomenon? Combining systematic analysis and cutting-edge empirical research, this volume will help us better understand an extremely important, yet relatively neglected, phenomenon.

Provides a comprehensive guide to the history and current shape of conspiracy theories in American life, including the findings of research seeking to understand their origins, type, function, and widespread appeal. This all-in-one resource provides an accessible overview of conspiracy theories past and present in all their many forms. Taking an even-handed, scholarly approach, the book outlines the longer history of conspiracy theories, starting with Ancient Greece and Rome and continuing the story up to the present day, including analysis of 9/11, anti-vaccine, COVID, and QAnon theories. It surveys an array of current books and articles to try to understand why people believe in and act on outlandish and evidence-free conspiracy theories. Notably, this resource also outlines the problems created by untrue conspiracy theories in terms of their negative impact on public debate, trust in others, and efforts to nurture an informed and educated citizenry. Instead, many conspiracy claims have become sources of misinformation, cynicism, and polarization. This book will benefit anyone who seeks a pathway through our current "epistemic crisis" in which the lines between fact and fiction-and between truth and falsehood-have become blurred.

This book is the first part of a series of written documentaries aimed at educating, informing, and empowering the people to take back what has been taken from them through fraud. This volume was first published on October 20, 2008 together with volume two in a 286 page 8"x10" cover; ISBN 1438261918. It is the purpose of these documentaries to gather the most valuable information of all types and put it in such form that it may be of service to those who seek right knowledge. This documentary will attempt to present material that you may not only find interesting, but will also find worth exploring beyond the confines of this book.

The 2008 presidential election was celebrated around the world as a seminal moment in U.S. political and racial history. White liberals and other progressives framed the election through the prism of change, while previously acknowledged demographic changes were hastily heralded as the dawn of a "post-racial" America. However, by 2011, much of the post-election idealism had dissipated in the wake of an on-going economic and financial crisis, escalating wars in Afghanistan and Libya, and the rise of the right-wing Tea Party movement. By placing Obama in the historical context of U.S. race relations, this volume interrogates the idealized and progressive view of American society advanced by much of the mainstream literature on Obama. Barack Obama and the Myth of a Post-Racial America takes a careful look at the historical, cultural and political dimensions of race in the United States, using an interdisciplinary analysis that incorporates approaches from history, political science, and sociology. Each chapter addresses controversial issues such as whether Obama can be considered an African-American president, whether his presidency actually delivered the kind of deep-rooted changes that were initially prophesised, and whether Obama has abandoned his core African-American constituency in favour of projecting a race-neutral approach designed to maintain centrist support. Through cutting edge, critically informed, and cross-disciplinary analyses, this collection directly addresses the dimensions of race in American society through the lens of Obama’s election and presidency.

American society has changed dramatically since A Culture of Conspiracy was first published in 2001. In this revised and expanded edition, Michael Barkun delves deeper into America's conspiracy sub-culture, exploring the rise of 9/11 conspiracy theories, the "birther" controversy surrounding Barack Obama's American citizenship, and how the conspiracy landscape has changed with the rise of the Internet and other new media. What do UFO believers, Christian millennialists, and right-wing conspiracy theorists have in common? According to Michael Barkun in this fascinating yet disturbing book, quite a lot. It is well known that some Americans are obsessed with conspiracies. The Kennedy assassination, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the 2001 terrorist attacks have all generated elaborate stories of hidden plots. What is far less known is the extent to which conspiracist worldviews have recently become linked in strange and unpredictable ways with other "fringe" notions such as a belief in UFOs, Nostradamus, and the Illuminati. Unraveling the extraordinary genealogies and permutations of these increasingly widespread ideas, Barkun shows how this web of urban legends has spread among subcultures on the Internet and through mass media, how a new style of conspiracy thinking has recently arisen, and how this phenomenon relates to larger changes in American culture. This book, written by a leading expert on the subject, is the most comprehensive and authoritative examination of contemporary American conspiracism to date. Barkun discusses a range of material-involving inner-earth caves, government black helicopters, alien abductions, secret New World Order cabals, and much more-that few realize exists in our culture. Looking closely at the manifestations of these ideas in a wide range of literature and source material from religious and political literature, to New Age and UFO publications, to popular culture phenomena such as The X-Files, and to websites, radio programs, and more, Barkun finds that America is in the throes of an unrivaled period of millenarian activity. His book underscores the importance of understanding why this phenomenon is now spreading into more mainstream segments of American culture.

Best-selling author Michael Shermer presents an overarching theory of conspiracy theories—who believes them and why, which ones are real, and what we should do about them. Nothing happens by accident, everything is connected, and there are no coincidences: that is the essence of conspiratorial thinking. Long a fringe part of the American political landscape, conspiracy theories are now mainstream: 147 members of Congress voted in favor of objections to the 2020 presidential election based on an unproven theory about a rigged electoral process promoted by the mysterious group QAnon. But this is only the latest example in a long history of ideas that include the satanic panics of the 1980s, the New World Order and Vatican conspiracy theories, fears about fluoridated water, speculations about President John F. Kennedy's assassination, and the notions that the Sandy Hook massacre was a false-flag operation and 9/11 was an inside job. In Conspiracy, Michael Shermer presents an overarching review of conspiracy theories—who believes them and why, which ones are real, and what we should do about them. Trust in conspiracy theories, he writes, cuts across gender, age, race, income, education level, occupational status—and even political affiliation. One reason that people believe these conspiracies, Shermer argues, is that enough of them are real that we should be constructively conspiratorial: elections have been rigged (LBJ's 1948 Senate race); medical professionals have intentionally harmed patients in their care (Tuskegee); your government does lie to you (Watergate, Iran-Contra, and Afghanistan); and, tragically, some adults do conspire to sexually abuse children. But Shermer reveals that other factors are also in play: anxiety and a sense of loss of control play a role in conspiratorial cognition patterns, as do certain personality traits. This engaging book will be an important read for anyone concerned about the future direction of American politics, as well as anyone who's watched friends or family fall into patterns of conspiratorial thinking.

This up-to-date introduction to the complex world of conspiracies and conspiracy theories provides insight into why millions of people are so ready to believe the worst about our political, legal, religious, and financial institutions. Unsupported theories provide simple explanations for catastrophes that are otherwise difficult to understand, from the U.S. Civil War to the Stock Market Crash of 1929 to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. Ideas about shadowy networks that operate behind a cloak of secrecy, including real organizations like the CIA and the Mafia and imagined ones like the Illuminati, additionally provide a way for people to criticize prevailing political and economic arrangements, while for society's disadvantaged and forgotten groups, conspiracy theories make their suffering and alienation comprehensible and provide a focal point for their economic or political frustrations. These volumes detail the highly controversial and influential phenomena of conspiracies and conspiracy theories in American society. Through interpretive essays and factual accounts of various people, organizations, and ideas, the reader will gain a much greater appreciation for a set of beliefs about political scheming, covert intelligence gathering, and criminal rings that has held its grip on the minds of millions of American citizens and encouraged them to believe that the conspiracies may run deeper, and with a global reach.

Fully revised and updated, The Rough Guide to Conspiracy Theories sorts the myths from the realities, the allegations from the explanations and the paranoid from the probable. Who might be trying to convince us that climate change is or isn't real? What is the truth behind the death of Osama bin Laden and is he still alive? When did the CIA start experimenting with mind control? Where is the HAARP installation and did it have anything to do with the Japanese tsunami disaster? Why is surveillance in our cities and online so widespread and what are the real benefits? This definitive guide to the world's most controversial conspiracies wanders through a maze of sinister secrets, suspicious cover-ups hidden agendas and clandestine operations to explore all these questions - and many many more. Now available in PDF format.