Originally published at: On 9/11, Talk Radio Hosts Kickstarted Our Current Era of Paranoia and Conspiracies - TPM – Talking Points Memo
In Rough Edges, Mike Rothschild writes about fringe groups, conspiracy theories and how the Internet broke our brains. This column is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. The Sept. 11 attacks came during a boom time for conspiracy theories. A vast industry of radio talkers, book writers, and cranks was finding new audiences on…
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It actually started much earlier than that with the removal of enforcement of the Equal Time rule and dropping of the Fairness Doctrine by the FCC which began in the late 1980’s. That allowed the advent of right wing hate radio which used fear and racism in the early 90’s to manipulate listeners. Limbaugh and others laid the initial groundwork, hijacking their listener’s amygdala’s (the part of the brain involved in fight or flight response). Once hijacked those listeners were primed to believe anything. 9/11 allowed them to expand their audience. By Obama’s time the Tea Party astroturf orgs created by the billionaires used racism to begin disabling democracy. In 2010 with the Citizen’s United ruling by the conservatives on SCOTUS gave the billionaires the ability to directly influence voting by throwing huge amounts of money into the arena. In 2024 Musk directly and openly manipulated young men using fake contests to buy votes. That leads us to today. There isn’t a single Republican advertisement that isn’t using lies, AI generated or manipulated images, and fear to try to get voters to vote against their own interests.
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Thanks for this reporting, real Gonzo. This cogent article proves the real America is alive and you only have to turn over a few rocks to find it. Jefferson said he would rather have a country without government than newspapers but with the internet and cable TV, now we can have both no newspapers and no government.
Bush II tended to skip his Daily Morning Briefing, NSA Chief Condoleezza Rice read it but decided the warning that Bin Laden would strike the USA, with airplanes, was not actionable information. Maybe a conspiracy?
“Sidney Blumenthal and Sean Wilentz speak with the authors of “Why Postliberalism Failed,” James M. Patterson of the University of Tennessee and Thomas D. Howe of Princeton, on why the new right now hates Reagan, its dark history, and why JD Vance will turn on Trump.”
I caught this podcast and it revived my interest in the Bavarian Illuminati, Freemasons and the Catholic/Fascist connection. For quantity of conspiracy theories the internet wins but for quality the Church is in contention.
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Conspiratorial drivel from the Right began long before 911. Rash Humbug got a Medal of Freedom for it from the Manchurean Cataloupe
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Morton Downey Junior, Wally George, Bob Grant…hell, even Paul Harvey.
(Carson’s Floyd R. Turbo didn’t just appear from nowhere in the 1970s.)
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The OG conspiracy theorists got to work blaming everything on the CIA. First they claimed the CIA was behind the overthrow of Mosaddegh in Iran in 1952, then they said the CIA had DRC President Lumumba murdered for business interests, of course there is that old saw the CIA orchestrated the coup in Chile killing President Allende- very coincidentally on 9/11/1973-what rubbish. There is this other crazy conspiracy theory that Israel has multiple nuclear bombs. It is simply outlandish what people will believe. I have heard other doozies too, such as the CIA overthrew the Guatemalan government for a fruit consortium & that Israel funded the nuclear bomb development in apartheid South Africa. It is unfathomable what people believe.
Was it merely a coincidence that most of the 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia & Iraq had magically disappearing WMD’s? I think so. We simply got to believe what we have been told- evidence be damned.