Foreword from The New Conspiracy Reader
Paranoia: The Conspiracy Reader emerged during the do-it-yourself zine craze of the early 1990s: before e-mail, before websites, and yes, even before The X Files.
Born in Newspeak book store in Providence, Rhode Island in 1992, Paranoia was the culmination of a group effort of The Providence Conspiracy League, a loose band of conspirators who had reported to Newspeak headquarters after reading meeting posters on telephone poles. A red 3-ring binder was established as the League’s official information repository, emblazoned with a graphic of Lee Harvey Oswald on the cover. When the binder began to bulge at the seams, it was decided that something more should be done with the collection. The information needed to be liberated.
The first issue of Paranoia had a black and white tabloid-style layout, with feature stories starting on the cover and continuing inside. The first issue, which featured a cover story by Al Hidell about the assassination of Malcolm X, was copied at Kinko’s. Our door-to-door attempts to get bookstores to sell the zine met with limited success, but the Kinko’s sample was enough to convince some alternative magazine distributors to help spread Paranoia. This in turn gave us the courage to dig into our pockets and finance a professionally-printed second issue, printed on newsprint that has since yellowed with age.
Although it has since moved on to full-color covers and glossy paper stock, Paranoia really hasn’t changed much. Since its inception, it has continued to capture a fanatical following by presenting alternative views and marginalized theories of the inner workings behind sociopolitical events. Its refusal to accept the mainstream version of reality has made Paranoia one of the foremost conspiracy journals in America. More to the point, it’s always been an entertaining and thought-provoking read. Or, as one early promotional flyer put it, Paranoia has served as "an anti-Reader’s Digest for hip paranoids." We’d like to take a moment to thank all those hip paranoids. Paranoia’s readers are both men and women, young and old. We don’t know much more than that because, frankly, we don’t think they’re the types who’d allow for detailed market research.
We’d also like to thank all of our writers, regardless of whether they are represented in this volume. In its decade plus history, Paranoia has drawn from a talented pool of authors and visionaries in the conspiracy, occult and paranormal genres.
Paranoia was a learning experience for us, its co-publishers. Part of that learning curve had to do with the ups and downs of the publishing business. But the other part had to do with the fact that the cryptocracy’s agenda has become increasingly undeniable. How could we have known that so many predictions of an impending New World Order would walk right off the pages of the magazine and into the real world?
Beginning with the Ruby Ridge FBI fiasco, to the WACO travesty, to the OKC bombing and 9/11, Paranoia has — sadly for America — never lacked for content. Through it all, Paranoia’s contacts were out there taking notes, connecting the dots, reading between the lines, trying to prevent anything notable from slipping under the wire.
Unbeknownst to its editors, over this awesome millennial time period, Paranoia had become a Time Capsule, an ongoing project of a growing group of suspicious notetakers who had never met, aside from letters, emails and telephone calls.
Paranoia’s pages contain a diverse collection of exclusive writings from the best minds in the business. The works in this book, the second Paranoia anthology, were carefully chosen from the bounty of articles that have appeared in Paranoia since 1999’s The Conspiracy Reader. We feel these articles are among the most provocative and entertaining of the lot. We have written new introductions for them, and have tried to note when articles became predictors of future events or trends.
We hope that you become absorbed in the pages of this book, as you bask in its visionary and paranoid rays. A protective tin-foil helmet is recommended, but not required.
Joan d'Arc and Al Hidell
Providence, Rhode Island, 2003
