By CHRISTOPHER MANION
Conspiracy theories are in the news these days, perhaps more often than usual because sources once acknowledged to be trustworthy, more or less, have proven to be unreliable in recent years. That’s why Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway insisted on “alternate facts” — the “other side of the story” that the legacy media steadfastly refuse to report.
In common parlance today, the term “conspiracy theory” is often used to discredit anyone and anything that the critic disagrees with. That’s how Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland employs the term as he perverts the Justice Department’s commitment to “equal justice under the law” to go after conservatives.
But conspiracies have been around for a long time, and some of them are real.
In the 1950s, Mrs. Dobbins, a neighbor of ours, would call every day or two and relate (to whomever answered) her latest discoveries about the dangers of fluoride in the town’s water system. She was rather taken with the subject, and as a 10-year-old I didn’t quite know what to make of it when it was my turn to pick up the phone.
But it wasn’t just the fluoride, it was Mrs. Dobbins’ devotion to her discovery and its potential, even dangerous, implications that attracted my attention. She was a “true believer” — in the language of those days, she might even have been termed a “kook.” But sure enough, today warnings about excessive fluoride exposure are ubiquitous. With good reason, they should be taken very seriously — just ask your dentist.
Yes, Mrs. Dobbins was zealous, but I don’t recall her ever asserting that fluoride was being inserted into the town’s water supply as a subterfuge to achieve some ulterior motive. I learned about the “conspiracy” aspect in the early 1960s. As a high-school student I started hearing the litany of potential conspiracies that were doing a lot more damage than fluoride ever could.
They came thick and fast. Ever since they met at the Bilderberg Hotel in 1954, the Bilderbergers were holding annual meetings in secret to plot their control of the world. They were unelected, even their identities were kept secret — well, kind of: A colleague of mine who wrote for a Virginia newspaper in those days tells me that the group’s 1964 meeting in Williamsburg was announced in his paper’s “community” section.
But the Bilderbergers were dangerous, and they were not alone. The Council on Foreign Relations, the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, and the Trilateral Commission all formed what Dan Smoot’s popular 1962 book called “The Invisible Government.” And at the center of it all was the Rockefellers.
Destructive Detours
Of course, none of these “conspiracies” were secret, since everybody was writing about them all the time. But the newly initiated didn’t know that. They’d pull you aside and tell you in hushed tones about Colonel Schmoo in Colorado. Why, they’ve just discovered his newsletter that opened their eyes to how the world really worked. Sure, they’d heard about the CFR, but if you buy his book you’ll learn about the Masons, the Illuminati, even the secret meeting in 1910 at Jekyll Island, Georgia! They were all there — J.P. Morgan, Rockefeller, even Colonel House — “and he founded the Council on Foreign Relations!”
Sometimes it was humorous, but sometimes it was grim. One day it was my turn to pick up the phone again, late in the 1950s, when a woman called asking for my father. Since he wasn’t there, she asked me to take a message. It went like this:
“My husband is has a good job, and we have a wonderful family. But about six months ago, he started getting a political newsletter. Then he ordered a bunch of books. He got so many that he made a little office in a closet next to the kitchen. When he got home, he’d would make a sandwich and read in that closet with the door closed. The family had dinner without him. He completely ignores me and the kids.
“He won’t listen to me, but I know he’ll listen to your father. So please ask your father to call my husband and tell him, I’M LEAVING HIM!”
With the True Believers, obsession can come with the territory. And there we encounter a potential side-effect that can be lethal.
Dr. Gerhart Niemeyer, a political theorist, was one of the greatest scholars of Marxism-Leninism of the last century. He knew as well as anyone that there were genuine conspiracies propounded by genuine conspirators. He devoted his life to studying them writing about them, and combatting them.
But he made a distinction that is so true that it is indispensable.
Some good people when introduced to the world of conspiracies are overwhelmed. Why, these secret cabals are running the world and there’s nothing we can do about it!
And they throw up their hands. They lock themselves in that closet by the kitchen.
They despair. We lose them.
“Get thee behind me, Satan,” Dr. Niemeyer said.
Real Conspiracies, Real Work
God doesn’t want us to quit. And yet, as we learn from Socrates, the more we know, the more we know we don’t know. This humbling revelation prompts us not to throw up our hands, but to roll up our sleeves.
Take Stan Evans — or M. Stanton Evans, as his readers know him. Stan never quit. A Yale graduate, he became the youngest major newspaper editor in the country. A gifted writer, he authored the Sharon Statement, the statement of principles that launched Young Americans for Freedom at their first meeting, held in 1961 at William F. Buckley, Jr.’s estate in Sharon, Conn.
Stan founded countless organizations, taught thousands of young conservatives (and some of us older ones), spoke everywhere, wrote tirelessly, and in addition provided the conservative movement with an indelible and unique sense of humor (“Conservatives coming to Washington know that it’s a sewer; the trouble is, most of them wind up treating it like a hot tub” — Stan Evans, 1981).
Stan knew all about conspiracies. He became an expert on Joe McCarthy, digging deep into the archives to prove, as my van’s bumper sticker used to say, that “McCarthy was Right.” He would spend the summer driving his pickup (with no air conditioning) to the basement of the University of Virginia’s library where he unearthed the archives — untouched by human hands — of Edward Stettinius, FDR’s secretary of state, whose most trusted adviser at Yalta was none other than Alger Hiss.
Robert Novak praised Stan’s “meticulous investigative journalism.” Phyllis Schlafly called him “a Sherlock Holmes-type detective who chased every clue to find the truth and to write accurate history in elegant prose.” He knew more about the Communist conspiracy than most Communists, and he wrote about it.
Was Evans an “expert”? Undoubtedly. But he didn’t flaunt his expertise — quite the contrary. Humility was woven into every page of his brilliant prose.
“Only by degrees have we come to understand the extent of this clandestine combat,” he wrote in Stalin’s Secret Agents, “and a great deal more is still waiting to be discovered. Even so, with the revelations of recent years we have enough data in hand to sketch the outlines of an astounding tale and fill in specifics about some matters long uncertain or contested.”
Naturally, Publishers Weekly panned the book’s “controversial case” due to its ‘fragmentary and episodic” evidence. Apparently we must ignore conspiracies especially real ones — if the conspirators conspired in secret.
Don’t know it all? Then don’t bother. Throw up your hands and let us keep running things. That’s the message of the Left. They want us to quit. God doesn’t.
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