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This is a misuse of the concept of culture in the title where "market" is clearly more accurate. It is a misleading legal and crime definition for "conspiracy" that is never intended to be the actual standard of measure. Instead, the author actually presents misinformation and fictive mass market manipulation to conform to a slippery slope rationalization of serialized opinion and associative thinking. Each chapter is led by association with other chapters, which constructs slippery slope opinion into a mix posing as scholarly analysis of comparative examples. On page 36 the author rightly informs us (as an historian) that subversive and countersubversion became not only politically respectable but compelling between opposition parties after World War ll.
In 'political combat' they "...incited public paranoia to gain advantage. Inscripting events at home and abroad to fit the plot, they found willing allies in Hollywood and among other opinion shapers. Their conspiracism proved more slogan than theory. In building the case, they submerged the principles of formal logic in a causal sequencing of events and association of individuals. Frequent repetition, and the status of the advocates sustained its power."
I submit to you that the vast majority of this work follows that very path utilizing logical fallacies to construct essentially rhetorical argument that makes all serious theory concerning actual government conspiracy look feeble. Case in point, chapter 4; (p.106 and passing) which dismisses all the serious research that questions the JFK assassination as essentially an emotive driven resort to fantasy on the part of mass public remorse and abject denial of counterfactual official commissioned reports. Keep in mind that the author/historian is no longer evaluating conspiracy as a political theory, but advancing it.
It is somewhat insultingly elitist to sell us the idea that ignorance and uncritical gullibility is an American Tradition ( *chapter 1). Americans are cynical, not traditionally stupid. In 2001 this work seems to service a political agenda of conservatism rather than insight into 'conspiriacism' as a process of deceptive legitimization with an implicit appeal to authority, slippery slope argumentation passing for conclusive analysis, and largely a fallacy of composition as its hard drive core production. In 2019 we may now conclude that there truly are 'enemies within' and these may still prove to be both lawless and crime ridden conspiracies by our imperial president. But these are not cultural, they are deplorables.
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