I Entered a Conspiracy to Write This Review

I’ve been reading on Facebook a lot from various conspiracy theorists. Some are so far out that I think what they are writing has to be satire or evidence of a serious mental befuddlement.

For example, the Sandy Hook elementary school shootings by Adam Lanza that killed 20 children and six adults --- and also his mother. the woman who helped train this young man(iac) --- is thought to be a conspiracy perpetrated by the whole town. Yes, the police, the parents, the firemen, the local grocery store owner, the media, the teachers, the garbage men, the electricians and the old folks rocking in the nursing home and, add to that, the little kids themselves.

To these conspiracy theorists, Lanza never killed anyone and all the kids are alive and well as is everyone else. In fact, there might not even exist an Adam Lanza.

With that in mind, I purchased The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory by Jesse Walker, an exhaustive study of conspiracy theories going back to the very first Europeans to come to this land --- actually even before the Europeans arrival, the American Indians were damn good at spinning conspiracy yarns too.

Walker takes us through every type of outrageous and even seemingly logical conspiracies, and he shows that many of them in different guises and forms are basically made from several categories: the enemy within, the enemy without, the strong clique manipulating events, even minor daily events in history and in your own little life. The conspiracies can even be a combination of these types.

Now, no one would say there are no conspiracies. Most spies are involved in conspiracies but these spies don’t belong to groups such as the Illuminati or the psychic underground or Aunt Emma’s sewing club. Normandy was a conspiracy after all.

In our own lifetime we have been subjected to the Kennedy Assassination Conspiracy (seems everyone from politicians and the mafia were into that one), the Martin Luther King Assassination Conspiracy (some of which blame Jesse Jackson), the Robert Kennedy Conspiracy, the World Trade Center Conspiracy (we bombed ourselves or Israel bombed us), the War is Good conspiracy that blames Republicans or Democrats for starting us on the path to lucrative wars that make individuals a lot of money supplying weapons or gaining oil rich lands for greedy corporations, rich people and politicians. The list goes on and on.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in clearing the air about the paranoia that travels throughout our history like a hand in a glove, which is probably a conspiracy of glove makers in huge cabals.

Conspiracy theorists might want to read the book to see exactly where on the conspiracy continuum their particular favorites fall.

Frank Scoblete is the author of I Am a Dice Controller: Inside the World of Advantage-Play Craps!