Obama Starts Race War to Win Election: An Inquiry Into Conspiracy Theories, Part II

By Sara Robinson

Created 07/29/2010 - 5:11pm

The beat goes on.

In the nearly two weeks since I wrote Part I of this series [1], an armed gunman was arrested en route to assaulting an obscure progressive foundation in San Francisco -- one that's often been at the center of Glenn Beck's blackboard (which has become Conspiracy Theory Ground Zero for 2010). Also, this just in [2]: President Obama is attempting to foment a race war, complete with New Black Panthers in the streets, in order to win the November elections.

I know. It's just so hard to keep up.

In the last post, I defined a conspiracy theory as "any story that assumes that things happen due to the deliberate, covert actions of powerful others -- even when the preponderance of evidence points to the conclusion that the events were almost certainly accidental and unintended." And I talked about the cultural conditions that soften up people's skulls and predispose them to accepting these baroque works of storytelling rather than simply accept what the evidence shows.

This post moves from outside influences to what goes on inside our heads. What's going on internally that makes conspiracy stories appealing to us as individuals? As before, I'm drawing heavily on David Aaronovitch's Voodoo Histories: The Role of Conspiracy Theories in Shaping Modern History [3] as one of the better guides out there to all the factors at play when we willfully choose to believe the unbelievable.