Stuff They Don’t Want You to Know

Bowlin, Frederick, and Brown expand on their podcast of the same name in this eye-opening and entertaining look at the roots of American conspiracy theories. Throughout, the authors alternate between exposing U.S. government actions that provide the seeds for conspiracy theories and debunking those theories. Ranging from biological warfare to CIA-engineered coups and assassinations and UFO sightings, the authors showcase an alarming lack of transparency and deliberate misrepresentations by government agencies. For example, they trace the roots of the popular chemtrail conspiracy theory, which posits that airplane vapor trails are evidence of the government dispersing chemicals for “nefarious purposes,” to a 1990s military paper on manipulating the weather “as a way to alter or control a battlespace” and 1950s tests in which the Army Chemical Corps sprayed the chemical compound ZnCdS over “enormous swaths” of the country to simulate a biological or chemical weapons attack. Elsewhere, the authors link the infamous Tuskegee experiment, in which poor Black sharecroppers were unwittingly enrolled in a government syphilis study yet received no treatment for the disease, to Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy among African Americans. Though many of the examples—including LBJ’s disseminations during the Gulf of Tonkin incident—are well-known, the authors amass a wealth of detail and lucidly separate fact from fiction. This is a valuable resource for understanding how conspiracy thinking gained its current grip on American politics and culture. [em](Oct.) [/em]