{"id":20650,"date":"2013-06-12T13:14:58","date_gmt":"2013-06-12T18:14:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=20650"},"modified":"2013-06-12T13:14:58","modified_gmt":"2013-06-12T18:14:58","slug":"vice-interviews-jesse-walker-about-his-new-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/06\/12\/vice-interviews-jesse-walker-about-his-new-book\/","title":{"rendered":"VICE<\/em> interviews Jesse Walker about his new book"},"content":{"rendered":"

The book is called The United States of Paranoia<\/em>, and VICE<\/em>‘s Harry Cheadle<\/a> sat down with Walker to talk about it:<\/p>\n

The question of whether you believe in conspiracy theories is surprisingly tricky. You may not think that the moon landing or Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s pregnancy was fake, you may not imagine lizards lurking behind Donald Rumsfield and Dick Cheney\u2019s faces, but by now you probably know that the US government is operating a massive secret surveillance apparatus<\/a>, which would sound like a paranoid fantasy if it weren\u2019t true. And many, many Americans<\/a> profess some level of credulity when it comes to some conspiracies, which at times can seem less crazy than believing that there\u2019s never, ever, a man behind the curtain pulling strings. <\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

VICE: You take a long historical view of conspiracy theories in America. Do you think we\u2019re more paranoid than we used to be?<\/strong>
\nJesse Walker<\/strong>: I don\u2019t think so. I\u2019m not quite sure how I would even measure that, given what the baseline of paranoia is. What I do think happens is that the direction of the paranoia shifts. One thing I mentioned in the book was how a lot of people started saying after Obama got elected, \u201cOoh, the right wing has suddenly gotten very paranoid.\u201d In fact, in the Bush era, there were tons of right-wing conspiracy theories, it\u2019s just that they weren\u2019t about the government. They were aimed mostly at people outside America\u2019s borders. With another party in power, [the right] has rediscovered some of its libertarian impulses. A lot of discussions about the United States becoming more paranoid or less paranoid just has to do with what kind of paranoia people are paying attention to.<\/p>\n

The recent revelations about the NSA and FBI\u2019s monitoring of cell phone metadata and internet communications make me wonder if it\u2019s possible that the government itself is paranoid.<\/strong>
\nI can\u2019t get into the head of the average NSA bureaucrat enacting a program. But I think that the creation of that sort of system obviously has to do with fear and paranoia. I should stress I\u2019m using the word paranoid<\/em> in a colloquial way. I should just be saying \u201cfear.\u201d Another problem has to do with the way \u201cconspiracy theory\u201d gets used, because people who use the phrase conspiracy theory<\/em> disparagingly believe in all sorts of conspiracies, it\u2019s just that they say, \u201cWell those are true, so they don\u2019t count.\u201d What they really mean when they say \u201cconspiracy theory\u201d is, at best, \u201cnutty conspiracy theory,\u201d and, at worst, \u201cconspiracy theory that feeds into an ideology that I don\u2019t share, which I will therefore think of as nutty.\u201d But I\u2019ve forgotten your original question.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The book is called The United States of Paranoia, and VICE‘s Harry Cheadle sat down with Walker to talk about it: The question of whether you believe in conspiracy theories is surprisingly tricky. You may not think that the moon landing or Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s pregnancy was fake, you may not imagine lizards lurking behind Donald Rumsfield […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,28,53,13],"tags":[127,299],"class_list":["post-20650","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-media","category-politics","category-usa","tag-conspiracytheories","tag-paranoia"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5n4","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20650","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20650"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20650\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20652,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20650\/revisions\/20652"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}