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Power  /  Antecedent

How the Right Became Addicted to Conspiracies

The conservative conspiracy lit that paved the way for Donald Trump.
Library of Congress

The 75-cent paperback was an instant success. Self-published under the imprimatur Liberty Bell Press, “None Dare Call It Treason” sold its first printing of 100,000 books in a few months, then another 100,000 in the first half of April. Another 100,000 sold two weeks later. By the time of the Republican National Convention in June, the book was on its eighth printing. Before Election Day, Stormer had printed 6.8 million copies, the number of sales limited only by how many he could produce.

Nor was it the only piece of conspiracy lit circulating at the time of the election. Phyllis Schlafly’s “A Choice Not an Echo” — about “a group of secret kingmakers” who had sold out the Republican Party — and J. Evetts Haley’s “A Texan Looks at Lyndon” — an Infowars-level tract accusing Johnson of stolen elections and about a dozen murders — also were self-published in 1964. Conservatives treated them as campaign literature: handing them out at rallies, distributing them at the convention, mailing them to Republican delegates. By Election Day, 16 million copies of the three books were in circulation.

These paperbacks were part of a flourishing conservative media scene in 1964. Seeing an opportunity in Goldwater’s candidacy, conservative media activists began making the case for his presidency, propelled not only by their excitement over Goldwater but their belief that his campaign — though considered extreme by many people, including Republicans — wasn’t going far enough in the making the case itself. The belief that established media were not covering Goldwater fairly also stoked the right’s appetite for conservative fare. In that atmosphere, the lines between right-wing political analysis and conspiracy lit blurred, and even more respected magazines like National Review heartily endorsed the campaign paperbacks.

The election wasn’t a victory for Goldwater, but it was a huge win for the conservative movement, which in the coming years would take over the GOP. Conservative media, too, would become increasingly powerful within American politics. And while the next few decades witnessed occasional efforts to sideline the fringe-y and conspiratorial, the right continued to find slopes to slip down, landing again and again in the muck of conspiracy. The Vince Foster conspiracies of the 1990s. Glenn Beck and his “beautiful-mind” chalkboards in the 2000s. Dinesh D’Souza’s conspiracy flicks in the 2010s. Birtherism and Alex Jones and just about everything that has come out of Donald Trump’s mouth since 2011. Conspiracies all.