Here’s an article I originally wrote for the rebooted International Times about how many conspiracy theories advanced by some on the fringe-left actually originated on the American far-right, and how conspiracy entrepreneurs feed and exploit the fears of their followers to sell nonsense products. Read it on Medium here. I’ve also posted it here: Examining and criticising the media narrative around world events is vital in order to unpick and dismantle neoliberal myths that support the West’s oppression of the developing world and help secure corporate domination at home. But this vigilance in questioning government and media mouthpieces can occasionally lead many intelligent and once sceptical people down the logical cul-de-sac of conspiracy theory. Increasingly I’ve noticed that the conspiracies advanced by sections of the fringe-left actually have their origin among the religious conservatives of the American far-right, buoyed along by a blossoming industry of conspiracy entrepreneurs. People have feared lluminati and Masonic plots since the eighteenth century. By the 1790s, pressure from the Catholic Church had led to the dissolution of the Bavarian Illuminati, a secret-society of liberal Enlightenment-era thinkers, but John Robison, in Proofs of a Conspiracy (1797), claims the organisation survived, and continued “for the express purpose of rooting out all religious establishments, and overturning all the existing governments of Europe”. Other writers shared his view, ascribing the group a central role in the French Revolution. Robison presents the Illuminati as a debauched, anti-Christian movement whose members had devised a tea to cause abortion, as well as a “method for filling a bedchamber with pestilential vapours”. Other strands of the current conspiracy worldview trace back to the second Red-Scare of the 1950s, and Communist paranoia in the United States. Modern conspiracy theorists share many of their fears with McCarthyism: the United Nations, vaccines, mental health provisions and […]