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conspiracies and americana
why are conspiracy theories such an american phenomemon? how have they become connected with politics? where did the leftist countercultural side diverge and turn into the right wing conspiracy phenomenon? working on writing something and i'd love help processing thoughts
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@FFH
Mar 3, 2025
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@kaeru
Read ‘The Resonance of Unseen Things’ by Susan Lepselter! This book really blew my mind when I read it. It’s an ethnographic (but really interdisciplinary) study of groups in the American southwest who believe in aliens visiting earth or that they’ve been abducted. The author suggest that histories of violence and colonialism in the American west when dissociated from their origins and context are easily translated into alien invasion/abduction narratives, where (white) settler populations can be portrayed as victim to the threat of a foreign group destroying their lifeways.
Mar 4, 2025
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@kaeru
to make the point more general—conspiracies (in the books opinion, and in mine) often emerge from extant or historical phenomena/events which have been divorced from their context, and I think Americans are generally pretty good at divorcing things from their contexts. I could go on about why, but kinda besides the point
Mar 4, 2025
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@FFH
kaeru ooh that’s really interesting i’ll check it out. maybe that’s a part of it - if americans lose their former cultures over time things start to develop in its place
Mar 4, 2025
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@haileyd4wn
That’s interesting. It’s like when cults take reasonable sentiments, then simultaneously dilute and embellish them to brainwash people. Conservatives tend to only trust themselves (pull yourself up by the bootstraps! no help from no one!), so, when they’re approached by thought processes that validate that and make them trust even less, it‘s addictive. so even though the questioning originated from a genuinely curious place, it became a cult. that’s my opinion.
Mar 3, 2025
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@1strawberrysecret
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LOSS OF AN AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY
was just listening to sleep by godspeed you! black emperor and the monologue at the beginning really struck me with a lot i've been thinking about lately about how america is a kind of corrosive force. its people (unless they're native americans who it actively seeks to eradicate) don't have any traditions, rituals, old knowledge passed down — their ancestors may have had these, but everything was ironed out and forgotten when they had to assimilate, not into a dominant culture but into an absence of one but little pockets of uniquely american experiences and stories have arisen in so many places and i'm really interested in finding them. like that monologue. but with the internet homogenizing culture those bubbles dissolve, and gentrification displaces the people who built them etc. it all feels like a drive towards nothing culture. but i guess what i want to ask is, what's your culture? have you held on to something that's yours? made something new? how can we make sure these things aren't lost? do you have any links to videos/stories/media that this makes you think of?
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@FFH
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Maybe a bit heady but..
I’ve been thinking a lot about how charlatans like John Todd played a huge roll in the satanic panic, but mostly how his rhetoric led to people’s obsession with arming themselves. Creating militant groups, conspiratorial thinking, preppers and survivalists, twisted religious cults.. How tools of war, for hunting, exploded beyond a hobby into an obsession and became part of our national identity, subsumed into our culture. How a bunch of angry people standing around with hammers will eventually look for something to nail down.
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