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WHEN ALL THE baby boomers were still children, in the early 1960s, the final legal end of white supremacy came into sight. And as a result, certain white Southerners started displaying Confederate symbols, and Southern states retrofitted state flags to include them. It was a historical rhyme of what had happened a century earlier, when losing the war led Southerners to glorify Dixie and the Lost Cause.
And as President, Reagan didn’t stick strictly to the voodoo path. He did dramatically cut some tax rates, but he also increased others and closed lots of loopholes to keep deficits from growing even larger. The government did not shrink.
“Greed is good,” the fictional Gordon Gekko declared in 1987, but now real people insisted that their moneymaking lust and skill were not merely useful in the aggregate but made them virtuous individually. The year after Wall Street came out, Reagan was reelected in one of the biggest landslides in history.
For Americans inclined to believe that prophecies definitely were coming together that portended the coming of Armageddon and so forth, the cheerful president of the United States had just confirmed it, as he would again and again. In the election two weeks later he won forty-nine states.
The audience had started getting bored with The Clinton Administration, but the Monica Lewinsky subplot, including its cover-up, got people interested again. Fox News and MSNBC were both new start-ups, and because politics had become a low-production-value subgenre of show business, it was engaging only when it was entertaining. When serious journalists started asking Clinton about having extramarital sex with an intern, the public was not so much alarmed as amazed and thrilled.
Fox News brought the Limbaughvian talk-radio version of the world to national TV, but it mingled straighter news with the news-ish commentary. It permitted viewers an unending and immersive propaganda experience of a kind that had never existed before.
Over the next year or two, the masses learned of the World Wide Web. The exponential rise of Fantasyland and all its dominions now had its perfect infrastructure.
Academic research shows that religious belief leads people to think that almost nothing happens accidentally or randomly: as the authors of some recent cognitive science studies at Yale put it, “individuals’ explicit religious and paranormal beliefs” are the main drivers of their exceptional “perception of purpose in life events,” their tendency “to view the world in terms of agency, purpose, and design.”
Those Yale researchers also found that believers in fate, religious and otherwise, include a large subset of “highly paranoid people” who “obsess over other people’s hidden motives.”
But consider the actual numbers: the total of agnostics and atheists has gone from extremely tiny (4 percent in 2007) to very tiny (7 percent in 2014). Those are percentages one otherwise finds in less-developed countries. If that is evidence for U.S. secularization, we are now just about as secular as, oh, Turkey.
We’re still more than 70 percent Christian, and around 70 percent of those are Protestant.fn1
The way evangelical replaced and subsumed fundamentalist, charismatic did the same for Pentecostal. Pentecostals are now just one old-school type of charismatic. The new coinage has made ecstatic outbursts and miraculous stunts—spontaneous shouting, shaking, and crying, hearing directly from God, channeling the Holy Spirit to get rich or cure illness or exorcise demons or speak in tongues—acceptable to Christians for whom Pentecostal has down-market white-yokel or black-ghetto connotations.
true. In 1991 the first Bush administration granted those creationist accreditors full U.S. government recognition. Intelligent design had a new blue-chip headquarters in Seattle called the Discovery Institute, a think tank and advocacy group dedicated to “revers[ing] the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview”—that is, science—and “replac[ing] it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.” The founder recruited a former U.S. senator and Microsoft’s former chief operating officer to join his board, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gave Discovery
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“Spiritual warfare,” systematic demon-fighting, is another old Christian concept that had mostly faded away in America—until it revived in the 1960s and took off during the 1980s and ’90s. It is now the animating notion across a broad swath on the darker side of American Christianity. A spiritual warfare Protestant is an evangelical or charismatic who’s angry about something. They call their loud, belligerent prayers against Satan “violent intercession.”
The American ecumenical mantra used to be We all worship the same God. In Fantasyland, it’s essentially None of us are sticklers for reason.
A woman in Washington State named Judith Darlene Hampton renamed herself Judy Zebra Knight, JZ for short, and became rich and famous by pretending to speak as Ramtha, a Stone Age warrior from the legendary land of Lemuria who’d fought a war against the legendary land of Atlantis and conquered most of the world before becoming an all-knowing demigod. JZ Knight attracted a ton of followers, including Shirley MacLaine.
More than any other single American by far, outside conventional religion and politics, Oprah Winfrey is responsible for giving a national platform and credibility to magical thinking, New Age and otherwise.
She has been an inclusive promoter of fantasies—extraterrestrial, satanic, medical, paranormal, all sorts of spiritual, sometimes Christian. When a Christian questioner in her audience once described her as New Age, Winfrey was pissed. “I am not ‘New Age’ anything,” she said, “and I resent being called that. I am just trying to open a door … and perhaps be the light to get them to God, whatever they may call that. I don’t see spirits in the trees, and I don’t sit in the room with crystals.”
IT’S ONE THING to try to experience more peace of mind or feel in sync with a divine order. Mixing magical thinking with medical science and physiology, however, can get problematic. A generation after its emergence as a thing hippies did, alternative medicine became ubiquitous and mainstream.
When The New Yorker’s science reporter Michael Specter told Oz he knew of no evidence that Reiki works, the doctor agreed—“if you are talking purely about data.” In Fantasyland, purely about data is a phrase like mainstream and Establishment and consensus and rational and fact, meaning elitist, narrow, and blind to the disruptive truths.
AS THE OLD, clear distinctions between plausible and preposterous beliefs and assertions were fading at the turn of this century, Michael Barkun wrote in A Culture of Conspiracy that the Establishment still maintained the fundamental true-false boundary “in a variety of ways”—“by withholding access to the most powerful and prestigious channels of communication; by withholding institutional rewards and sponsorship from certain ideas; and by subjecting fringe ideas and those who hold them to scorn.”
Jean Baudrillard became a celebrity among American intellectuals by going further, declaring that rationalism was a tool of the oppressors that was tapped out as a way of understanding the world, pointless and doomed. In other words, as he wrote in 1986, “the secret of theory”—this whole intellectual realm now called itself simply Theory—“is that truth does not exist.”
Then there’s Steve Fuller, born and raised in New York, a graduate of Columbia, now a professor of the history and sociology of science. Scientific inquiry, he says, really is no different from or superior to religious belief. He’s all for what he calls a “re-enchantment of science” and for letting anyone decide the factual truth of anything—the equivalent of “what happened in the Protestant Reformation, getting the Bible in your own hands, reading it for yourself.”
A leader of this counter-Establishment is Gary Schwartz. He got his psychology Ph.D. from Harvard and spent a decade at Yale as a professor of psychology and psychiatry. In middle age, he decided that souls exist and the living can communicate with the dead, and he set about trying to prove it. He moved from Yale to the University of Arizona and deep into Fantasyland. Although he has no M.D. or hard-science degree, he’s now a professor of neurology and medicine—and director of the university’s Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness and Health, where the main research programs include
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Jodi Dean is a political scientist, a Princeton graduate who took her advanced degrees at Columbia in the 1990s, as postmodernism achieved what she’d probably call hegemony. She’s now a full professor with an endowed chair at Hobart and William Smith, a fine liberal arts college in upstate New York. In her book Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace, she was delighted on principle “to defend the veracity of people claiming to be not just [UFO] witnesses but abductees.”
I could fill pages with examples from the 1990s on, but a small sampling should do. Crossing Over with John Edward, a program purporting to let people communicate with the dead, was a big hit for the USA Network. Back then, when TLC was still called The Learning Channel, the taglines for a show during its Conspiracy Week were “Did they really catch the man behind the Oklahoma City bombing? Or was there a conspiracy?” In this century, especially in the last decade, TV really gave itself over to the wanton retailing of fantasies as realities.fn3
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., the first big New York media company to enter the Christian book market in a big way, in the 1980s, has practically cornered it, selling half the true-believer books in the United States. Four of the five largest publishers now have their own Christian imprints. Time Warner calls its Warner Faith—an evangelical Christian publisher named after the Jewish brothers who founded the Hollywood dream factory out of which the company sprouted.
The movement has a strong religious aspect. One of its most celebrated leaders, a former Army Intelligence captain named James Wesley, Rawles (he insists on that odd comma), has invited survivalists to the intermountain Northwest, what he calls the American Redoubt—an exodus “analogous to the Puritan exodus from Europe. They couldn’t fit in and said, ‘We’re going to move to completely virgin territory and start afresh.’ Christians of all races are welcome to be my neighbors.”
And it’s definitely another American phenomenon. In the whole of the United Kingdom, according to the Guardian, there is only a single shop, in a little nowhere land east of Milton Keynes, that specializes in gas masks and crossbows and machetes and tactical thumbcuffs for survivalists and preppers. The United States has scores of dedicated brick-and-mortar stores, as well as service businesses like American Redoubt Realty, which sells houses to survivalists “in the American Redoubt, or in one of the many Micro-Redoubt Safe Havens around the United States.”
YOU HAVE TO be of a certain age to recall the frenzy. Even if you’re old enough to remember, you probably didn’t register the extremity of what happened. But during the 1980s and ’90s, Americans suddenly imagined that children—by the tens or hundreds of thousands—were being abducted and tortured and kidnapped and murdered every year.
In the early 1980s, following the disappearances and murders of Etan Patz in New York City, Adam Walsh in South Florida, and two dozen children in Atlanta, a national missing-children panic ignited. Congress passed a federal Missing Children’s Act, and milk cartons were plastered with photographs of missing children. News media pegged the number of abductions at between 20,000 and 50,000 a year, with estimates up to the hundreds of thousands.
And indeed, a decade later the FBI estimated that the number of true kidnapping victims was no more than three hundred a year, most of whom were not murdered.
AROUND THE SAME time, the culture recognized that the sexual abuse of children by adults close to them was more common than anyone had imagined—that it had been terribly underreported and underprosecuted. The exposure of sexual abuse and its prevalence—by victims, law enforcement, and the press—was important and heroic. There was, however, a panicked and extreme national overreaction as well, as the flurry
Among the most respectable promoters of this idea was Jeffrey Masson, a slick, Sammy Glick–ish young historian of psychoanalysis who worked for the Freud Archives at the Library of Congress. In the early 1980s, his book The Assault on Truth declared that “nobody had lied to Freud” when they’d described sexual abuse; rather, the original therapist had simply refused to believe his patients. The lies “came from Freud and the whole psychoanalytic movement,” who suppressed the ugly social reality. In other words, Masson, a member of the elite, was exposing a century-long conspiracy and cover-up by
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The idea that satanic cults were systematically and commonly subjecting American children to nightmarish abuse—by the thousands, by the tens or hundreds of thousands—was more or less invented by a young woman just across Puget Sound from Seattle. In her twenties, Michelle Proby, her life a mess, was treated by a psychiatrist named Lawrence Pazder.
After Michelle Remembers, Americans started “remembering” their own forced involvement in horrific satanic rituals. The details of their stories—drugs, sexual abuse with devices, torture, animal mutilation, human sacrifice, cannibalism—tended to bear an uncanny resemblance to the template established by Dr. and Mrs. Pazder. Rather than being a one-off artifact, Michelle Remembers was the prototype for a genre, for more books that inspired more copycat fabulists to undergo hypnosis and declare themselves victims of satanic cults that raped children and bred and killed babies.
But in 1980, psychiatry’s bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, for the first time included multiple personality disorder as a full-fledged diagnosis.
In the next fully revised edition of the DSM, American psychiatry officially renamed the phenomenon “dissociative identity disorder.” Despite the more scientific-sounding name, many experts in psychology and psychiatry continued to consider it bogus.
The Satanic Panic never really took off outside the United States. A historian in Norway found that until Rivera’s 1988 NBC special was covered in the Norwegian press, there had been no public references to satanic ritual abuse. According to The Day Care Ritual Abuse Moral Panic, published in 2004 by a U.S. social psychologist specializing in trauma and mental illness, the few international prosecutions in the 1980s and ’90s were generally “closed in a matter of months,” which “made it difficult for the kind of improvised news that romped around in the shadows of the [U.S.] daycare cases …
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DURING THE DECADE after Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), more and more Americans claimed they’d been personally visited, probed, and temporarily taken away by extraterrestrials—abducted. Many Americans with impressive credentials started to believe them. None was more impressive or important than a distinguished Harvard professor named John Mack.
The Boston Herald called Abduction “a transcendent, landmark work,” and The New York Times Book Review said Mack had “performed a valuable and brave service.” The PBS science series Nova devoted an episode to Mack.
In 1999, not long after the New Yorker journalist Michael Kelly coined the term fusion paranoia to describe how a conspiracist paradigm was increasingly shared by left and right, thousands of progressives assembled in Seattle for a few days to demonstrate their hatred of the global capitalist apparatus.
fusion paranoiac. Long before Breitbart.com existed or Trump entered politics, Jones was ignoring the standard ideological lines to forge a confederacy of paranoids. JFK was “the last true president of the United States,” and Lee Harvey Oswald was a patsy—just like Timothy McVeigh. “The Establishment,” he has said, “they want to make it … right-wing versus left-wing.”
The advertising on Jones’s various media platforms illustrates the overlaps among regions of make-believe. Marketing Infidel body armor (“excellent protection that stops AK-47s”) makes obvious sense. But on an ad for a natural medicine called Ancient Defense Herbal Immunity Complex, Jones himself does the voice-over: “the knowledge of the ancients, tried and true, trusted herbs and extracts fused with the latest neutraceutical science.” He’s also acutely attuned to a different overlap—between his fictional journalism and fictional prime-time depictions of it.
But the pale, the agreed-upon boundary line between reasonable and deranged, has moved by thousands of miles in Fantasyland. Fantastic beliefs that were beyond the pale twenty years ago are now mainstream. Alex Jones is deluded and hysterical, but he draws lines—between unbelievable and really unbelievable conspiracies, such as the one overseen by shape-shifting reptilian humanoids.fn1
Donald Trump appeared on Alex Jones’s show as a candidate and, right after the election, according to Jones, phoned him. “He said, ‘Listen Alex, I just talked to the kings and queens of the world, world leaders, you name it, but … I wanted to talk to you.… We know what you did early on, throughout this campaign.’” “It shows he’s not the average elitist,” Jones continued, still jazzed from his conversation with the president-elect,
I doubt the GOP elite deliberately engineered the synergies between the economic and religious sides of their contemporary coalition. But there it is nonetheless. As the incomes of middle-and working-class people flatlined, Republicans pooh-poohed rising economic inequality and insecurity; economic insecurity does correlate with greater religiosity; and for white Americans, greater religiosity does correlate with voting Republican. For Republican politicians and their rich-getting-richer donors, that’s a virtuous circle, not a vicious one.
Libertarianism used to have a robust left wing as well. Both disliked government. Both were driven by a fantastically nostalgic conviction that a country of three hundred million people at the turn of the twenty-first century could and should revert to something like its nineteenth-century self. Both had a familiar American magical-thinking fetish for gold—to return to gold as the foundation of U.S. currency because, they think, only gold is real. However, as the post-Reagan Republican mother ship maintained extreme and accelerating antigovernment fervor—acquiring escape velocity during the
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The Christian takeover happened gradually, but then quickly in the end, like a phase change from liquid to gas. In 2008 three-quarters of the GOP presidential primary candidates said they believed in evolution, but in 2012 it was down to a third, and then in 2016 only one did. That one, Jeb Bush, was careful to say evolutionary biology was only his truth, that “it does not need to be in the curriculum” of public schools, and if it is, ought to be accompanied by creationist teaching.
In fact, there are millions of American Christians trying to realize their fantasy of a fully theocratic nation. Their movement is called the Third Wave or dominionism, a term coined by Peter Wagner, the godfather of “spiritual warfare,” who believes the satanic sun goddess has sex with the Japanese emperor (see Chapter 31). The movement is a loose confederation of churches, mostly charismatic and Pentecostal but some merely fundamentalist. They are endeavoring to acquire political and cultural power in order to battle and defeat demons and put fundamentalist Christians in charge.
