Truth seeker sounds breezy and appealing, especially when it’s used in place of other, more derisive terms that are often applied to the same behavior. Those terms are always changing, rotated out after they become too loaded. Even conspiracy theory was a neutral turn of phrase for many years—a piece of forensic jargon. It first gained prominence in the 19th century, following the 1881 shooting of President James Garfield, in the sense that the possibility of a conspiracy was just one theory an investigator might hold among many about the assassination. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, this was how the phrase was used, in courtrooms and the media.
Only after World War II did we gain a term for the feared and scorned creator of conspiracy theories, the conspiracy theorist—a person who pushes unfounded narratives of secret schemes and cover-ups, often to further her own aims. In the aftermath of Nazism and then McCarthyism, Americans grew worried about the harmful power of these theories, says Katharina Thalmann, an assistant American-studies professor at the University of Tübingen in Germany and the author of the 2019 book The Stigmatization of Conspiracy Theory Since the 1950s. Once academics and journalists—the philosopher Karl Popper and the historian Richard Hofstadter, most famously—started writing on the topic, conspiracy theory took on a very negative connotation, Thalmann told me. “That’s when people start[ed] to point fingers at conspiracy theorists.”
It would soon be common knowledge among Americans that conspiracy theorists are dangerous and must be kept out of mainstream discourse. (In their 1970 book, The Politics of Unreason, Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Rabb noted, “The conspiracy theory fleshes out nativist bigotry; and nativist bigotry fleshes out the conspiracy theory.”) As the reputation of conspiracy theorists foundered, they responded by rebranding the nature of their work. Instead of writing about “conspiracies,” per se, they deployed more open-ended phrases about how they were “just asking questions,” or examining “discrepancies” in a given narrative.
https://archive.ph/uy4o6#selection-421.1-421.28
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[ - ] robotflex [op] 0 points 3.8 yearsJul 16, 2021 02:21:09 ago (+0/-0)
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329818650_Conspiracy_Theory_The_Nineteenth-Century_Prehistory_of_a_Twentieth-Century_Concept
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[ - ] robotflex [op] 0 points 3.8 yearsJul 16, 2021 02:32:30 ago (+0/-0)
by Leo Lowenthal
https://libcom.org/files/Leo%20Lo_wenthal%20and%20Norbert%20Guterman%20-%20Prophets%20of%20Deceit%20-%20A%20Study%20of%20the%20Techniques%20of%20the%20American%20Agitator%20(1949).pdf
"1. EcoNOMIC GRIEVANCES. The agitator roams freely over every area of '
economic life. He may begin anywhere at all. Too much help is being
extended to foreign nations. "If we have any money to offer for nothing,
or to loan, or to give away, we had better give it to our own first. Of
course, that is old fashioned.''1
Not only are foreigners taking our money, they also threaten our jobs.
"People born in America have to commit suicide because they have
nothing to eat while refugees get their jobs.''2
Behind such injustices stand "The International Bankers, who devised
and control our money system, [and] are guilty of giving us unsound
money."3
Such situations constitute a danger to the American way of life, for
"what is more likely to follow many years of Nudeal communistic confiscatory taxation, wool-less, metal-less, auto-less regimentation and planned scarcities than our finally becoming stripped by necessity to Nudism?"4
2. PoLiticAL GRIEVANCES. International commitments by the United
States government jeopardize political liberties. "Like Russia, the United
States is suffering from the scourge of internationalism.''5 The American -
people are warned: "Be not duped by the internationalists who dwell
amongst us."6
Of course it is only reasonable that "treaties and agreements . . . shall
be reached with other nations, but ... we want no world court and no
world congress made up of a few Orientals and a few Russians and a
few Europeans and a few British ... to make laws for us to obey ... .''7
From within, this country is threatened by radicalism, which prepares
strikes that are "dress rehearsals for a forthcoming general strike that is
meant to paralyze the Nation. , , ,"8
We face both the danger of a "Soviet America . . . where . , . an Austrian-born Felix Frankfurter presides over an unending 'Moscow trial.'
, • .''9 and the rule of "tyrannical bureaucrats" who if they "could have
their way completely" would institute a "dictatorship in America as
merciless as anything on earth. "10
8. CULTURAL GRIEvANCES. The agitator is greatly disturbed because the
media of public information are in the hands of enemies of the nation.
" ... the Hollywood motion picture industry is being exploited by Russian
Jewish Communists determined to inject their materialistic propaganda
into the fresh young minds of our children . . ."11 Hollywood is "largely
dominated by aliens who have appropriated to their own use the inventions and discoveries of native citizens and who now specialize in speculation, indecency and foreign propaganda."12
''The American press will never be free" until control "is removed from
racial, religious and economic pressure groups."13
4. MoRAL GRIEVANCES. The enemies of the agitator are notoriously lax
in morals : they engage in luxury consumption, they are a "crowd of
Marxists, refugees, left-wing internationalists who enjoy the cream of the
country and want the rest of us to go on milkless, butterless, cheeseless
days while they guzzle champagne."14
And what is most galling of all is that "we gentiles are suckers." For
"while we were praying they had their hands in our pockets."15"