Conspiracy/Theory Quotes

“With this context in mind, I do not see how one can afford to not be a kind of conspiracy theorist today, mobilizing all one’s faculties and resources to engage a national, corporate, political project that is structured by violent deceptions and that has never really developed a robust social commitment to public accountability.”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“an official effort to destabilize citizens’ sense of reality,”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“Consider the commitment of major oil companies to simultaneously promoting scientific study of the global warming effects from petrochemical emissions while also funding major antienvironmental disinformation campaigns (Oreskes and Conway 2010).”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“White House officials leaking information to major newspapers and then going on television citing those statements as nonpartisan facts that they had nothing to do with.”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“Faking nuclear vulnerability was subsequently installed as a basic part of the military industrial and defense strategy tool kit.”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“defense intellectuals, despite decades of energetic work, were never able to define the minimum nuclear capabilities needed to create deterrence,”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“The logics of nuclear production and deterrence in the twentieth century relied on a serious game of perception management,”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“proponents sought to craft a narrative to gain public support rather than evaluating facts on the ground (see Mann 2004).”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“Thus, it is important to ask: What would constitute a critical theory of this kind of official deception, where misdirection is authorized as normalized statecraft?”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“(see Haines 1999).”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“gaslighting, psychological operations, and emotional-management campaigns”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“Trump rallies mimic the structure of WWE events where the heel cheats and steals and ridicules to provoke the audience.”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“hyperviolent political order—”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“Nothing, however, marked the post-truth moment more than conspiracy theory—”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“corrupted public sphere.”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“therapeutic demystification.”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“both conspiracy narrative and debunking discourse are often motivated by a desire to heal the dysfunctional public sphere with therapeutic transparency.”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“On the history of the concept of conspiracy theory, see McKenzie-McHarg 2019 and Thalmann 2017.”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“See “The Post-truth Issue” (2017) of the Chronicle of Higher Education; Glasser (2016); Florido (2016); Davies (2016); Szklarski (2017); Freeman and Freeman (2017); R. Marcus (2016); Todd, Murray, and Dann (2017); Rosenberg (2017); and Mariani (2016).”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“cannot simply be bracketed out of reasoned discourse.”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“DARPA sought literally to crack the power of narrative.”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“In some cases, this means drawing attention to things we already know but have not been able to recognize or acknowledge or think about collectively. In other cases, this means bringing to the fore new factual truths or ways of thinking or seeing that have eluded our scrutiny.”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“in Hanna Pitkin’s (1972, 178) words, “empirical investigation presupposes conceptual definition,”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“Since Three Days of the Condor (1975), heroic publication has become a staple denouement of films like The Insider, The Firm, The Package, Michael Clayton, The Green Zone, Fair Game, Safe House, and many others.”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“But perhaps no threat is more common in conspiracy melodrama than what Donald Trump and his supporters call the “deep state”—a group of plotters unaccountable to their democratically elected leaders and feverishly crafting their own diabolical policy deep in the bowels of the “administrative state.”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“the term conspiracy theory is less innocent and simple than it seems.”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“the Cold War National Security State was itself built as a hedge against the perceived weaknesses of the open society.”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“In so doing, they imitated the secret agency they attributed to their communist enemies.”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“Foucault suggests the persistent appeal of this notion, warning that in our thinking about power “we have still not cut off the head of the king” (88–89).”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“demonology”—the conservative American tendency toward paranoid scapegoating—and paradoxical imitation—of the putative enemies of state.”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory