The United States of Paranoia Quotes

“This is a book about America’s demons. Many of those demons are imaginary, but all of them have truths to tell us. A conspiracy story that catches on becomes a form of folklore. It says something true about the anxieties and experiences of the people who believe and repeat it, even if it says nothing true about the objects of the theory itself.”
― Jesse Walker, The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory

“When you think you’re pursuing a divine destiny, it’s not hard to find yourself watching for all the other invisible forces out there: darker, more dangerous powers who don’t want your holy mission to succeed.”
― Jesse Walker, The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory

“But it also declares that political paranoia is “the preferred style only of minority movements”—and, just to marginalize that minority some more, that it has “a greater affinity for bad causes than good.”
― Jesse Walker, The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory

“Pundits tend to write off political paranoia as a feature of the fringe, a disorder that occasionally flares up until the sober center can put out the flames. They’re wrong. The fear of conspiracies has been a potent force across the political spectrum, from the colonial era to the present, in the establishment as well as at the extremes. Conspiracy theories played major roles in conflicts from the Indian wars of the seventeenth century to the labor battles of the Gilded Age, from the Civil War to the Cold War, from the American Revolution to the War on Terror. They have flourished not just in times of great division but in eras of relative comity. They have been popular not just with dissenters and nonconformists but with individuals and institutions at the center of power. They are not simply a colorful historical byway. They are at the country’s core.”
― Jesse Walker, The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory

“In the twenty-first century, rank-and-file Republicans attack their enemies as the puppets of the billionaire George Soros while rank-and-file Democrats attack their enemies as the puppets of the billionaires Charles and David Koch. We’re told that only the fringe believes in the Enemy Above, yet tales of his machinations have become a routine part of partisan politics. The Devil’s cleverest trick is to persuade you that hardly anyone believes he exists.”
― Jesse Walker, The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory

“The eightfold path of what a witch must master to be a powerful witch—that’s the symbol of Denny’s.”
― Jesse Walker, The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory

“gruesome version of that tale reappeared in Atlanta during the child murders of 1979 to 1981, when at least twenty-one black children and teenagers (and a handful of young adults) were kidnapped and killed. According to one rumor, the government was harvesting the kids’ genitals to make aphrodisiacs.”
― Jesse Walker, The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory

“This curious coalition of Muslims and Marxists had picked Watts, Allen wrote, because blacks were actually rather well off there: “[I]f Watts could be exploded they could do it anywhere else in America.” So they had flooded the area with propaganda, most notably a “publicity campaign rivaling the Advertising Council’s promotion of Smokey the Bear” aimed at “the construction of the myth of police brutality.” With”
― Jesse Walker, The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory

“When the Mattachine Society of Washington’s founder, Frank Kameny, testified to a congressional committee in 1962, he informed his interrogators that the group’s mailing list had only about a hundred names on it. That was inconceivable to congressmen such as John Dowdy, a Texas Democrat who had assumed that the society was an arm of a “national and international organization” with “up in the millions” of members.79 The committee was puzzled further by the fact that Kameny believed that there were a quarter-million homosexuals in the city—not because they doubted that there were so many, but because he didn’t have each one’s contact information. The investigators assumed, Johnson wrote, “that homosexuals were inherently drawn to the same clique and would somehow all be on the same mailing list.”
― Jesse Walker, The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory

“If we’re looking at supposed subversives who can’t easily be distinguished from other Americans, who are rumored to recruit young people into an underground society, who gather in forbidden places and communicate through code, there’s one more subculture we should discuss before leaving the Enemy Within behind. Even its members have been known to describe their lives with metaphors of conspiracy. “Occasionally two homosexuals might meet in the great world,” Gore Vidal wrote in The City and the Pillar. “When they did, by a quick glance they acknowledged one another and, like amused conspirators, observed the effect each was having. It was a form of freemasonry.”73”
― Jesse Walker, The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory

“In the next few chapters I will lay out five primal myths that underlie America’s conspiracy folklore. By using the word myths, I don’t mean to suggest that these stories are never true. I mean that they’re culturally resonant ideas that appear again and again when Americans communicate with one another: archetypes that can absorb all kinds of allegations, true or not, and arrange them into a familiar form. One is the Enemy Outside, who plots outside the community’s gates, and one is the Enemy Within, comprising villainous neighbors who can’t easily be distinguished from friends. There is the Enemy Above, hiding at the top of the social pyramid, and there is the Enemy Below, lurking at the bottom. And then there is the Benevolent Conspiracy, which isn’t an enemy at all: a secret force working behind the scenes to improve people’s lives.”
― Jesse Walker, The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory

“The Mormons might not have maintained an order of covert killers, but they did build their own institutions: schools, temples, courts of arbitration, an elaborate private welfare system, a network of cooperatives. Those were the sorts of voluntary organizations that Americans often celebrate, but they appeared to be entwined with civil government in predominantly Mormon areas out west, with the same figures dominating both church and state. Sometimes they were more influential than the formal institutions of government. This stoked still more fears of subversion, and it led to some stunning restrictions on the Saints’ civil liberties. In 1884, the Idaho territory made it illegal for Latter-day Saints to vote, hold office, or serve on a jury. Legislators invoked the standard anti-Mormon conspiracy theories, but lurking behind those exotic charges were more ordinary resentments: opposition to plural marriage, jealousy of the Mormon co-ops’ economic clout,43 and, above all, Republicans’ eagerness to disenfranchise a group that in Idaho voted overwhelmingly for the Democrats.”
― Jesse Walker, The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory