January 18, 2025 • 17 mins
Guest host Rich Berra and author David Samuels explore the history of conspiracy theories, if Americans tend to believe conspiracy theories more than other countries, and discuss some of the most famous conspiracy theories from the JFK assassination to the Los Angeles wildfires to the conspiracy theory that led to the American Revolution.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Let's bring in David Samuel to the show right now.
The editor of Country Highway. It's a magazine styled as
a nineteenth century American broadsheet, which he co founded. Raised
in Brooklyn, New York, Samuels is a longtime writer for Harper's,
The New Yorker in others and is known for his
mastery of new old journalism. And we're going to get
(00:26):
into some conspiracy stuff tonight. Let's bring him in right now.
As a matter of fact, let's get to the latest
conspiracy and why it's ripe for him to pick apart
as being probably not a morsel of truth in it.
Welcome to the show, David, nice to meet you.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
Thanks so much for having me. What a pleasure.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
A pleasure for me too. So the moment that the
fire start in Los Angeles, the first thing I start
hearing is that you can see three of them, are
two of them starting from a satellite from an aerial
view at the exact same time, And people are comparing
it to the fires in Hawaii and the high winds
(01:07):
and how quickly it's swept through and the biggest one
I'm hearing is that the money elites are trying to
put together a smart city and therefore the fires were
set on purpose. Do you want to talk about that
for a second, your thoughts on that one.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
I mean, I want to say first that you know
two things about conspiracy theories. The first one is that
this country is founded on a conspiracy theory, which is
that King George the third had a plot to deprive
American colonists and indeed just starting with them, all Englishmen,
(01:47):
of their traditional liberties. And that's why we had the
American Revolution was because of this deep dark plot by
evil King George the Third and his counselors. Of course,
there was no such plot. King George the Third was
a you know, maybe better, slightly better than average English king.
(02:10):
He had no plans to deprive anybody of their traditional liberties,
and indeed he never did.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
Really, I don't think I knew that. I think that's
pretty interesting the.
Speaker 3 (02:23):
American that's the American revolution. That's why we had a
revolution in this country was because of it goes back
actually to seventeenth century English Whig political theory, which positive
that the king was a sort of monster in waiting,
and in the eighteenth century American colonists claimed to believe.
(02:48):
Whether they actually did believe it as a matter of
some debate, but certainly if you read the pamphlet literature
that they tried to convince their fellow soon to be
countrymen to rebel against the crown, that's the case they made.
We are on the verge of tyranny here, and it's
(03:10):
a tyranny coming straight from London, from this evil king
and his crazed advisors. And first they're going to deprive
us of our liberties. That's why the little things the
Crown did mattered so much, which is that they were
signs of this much larger tyrannical plot. And Sam Adams
and all the Patrick Henry, the pamphleteers of the revolution,
(03:36):
you know, hammered away at this point in their pamphilet
literature leading up to the revolution, and that was the
cause of the revolution. It was fake.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Well, there seems like though, there must be a kernel
of truth in the emotion behind what fuels a conspiracy
to kind of get off the ground. In fact, us
talking about it with the crew before the show, and
I said, I wonder if this in this day and age.
If I just told you I was going to start
a conspiracy a theory about something, what would be faster
(04:12):
how it takes flight over the internet and starts catching
or you debunking it, and it goes to my theory
that I've had for a long time. It's a lot
easier to convince somebody of something that is ridiculous than
it is to tell them that they're being fooled. Do
you feel like we're that country.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
To Yeah, I think everybody is. Nobody likes to admit
that they were fooled. You know. I would also say that,
you know, my second point about conspiracy series is the
more general human point, which is that our brains are
pattern finding machines. They are made to find patterns.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
To connect the dots and.
Speaker 3 (04:57):
Connect the dots exactly. That's how we understand that, you know,
when rain falls from the sky, then plants grow. Right,
that's a conspiracy. I mean that we bit of data
that we connect to every other bit, right, is a theory.
(05:18):
It's part of a you know, the pattern. We're searching
for patterns, and the ones that prove to be useful
or true, you know, are the things that fuel are
you know, first of all our ability to to hunt,
to grow crops, to build stuff that doesn't fall down
(05:42):
to you know, so so so this is the fundament
of our existence. So we do it naturally, and it's
the thing that you know, distinguishes us from from uh
lower animals, So we'll always do it. And the third
thing that I'd say is that the term conspiracy theory
(06:08):
has a specific historical origin, which is the Warren Commission report.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
The Kennedy assassination. Which I was going to bring that
to your attention because it seems like, maybe, I don't know,
fifteen twenty years ago, you would have thought that just
what you heard the Warren Report might have been the thing.
But then now it seems like most people believe that
the CIA had a part in taking out Kennedy. Is
that part of getting conspiracy out of control or do
(06:40):
you think we're onto something there.
Speaker 3 (06:44):
Well, first, the history of the term conspiracy theory, which
is embedded in the Warren Commission report, is worth unpacking
a bit before we get to the question whether I
actually believe the Warren Commissions fair. So, the Warren Commission
(07:06):
report positive that a rone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, killed
John F. Kennedy. That was known as the rone gunman theory,
and the Warren Commission ran into significant levels of resistance
to that theory. The CIA came up with the term
(07:33):
conspiracy theory to describe in the testimony of CIA officials
the alternate theory or theories that a group of people
had conspired to kill the president. Right. That was the
first use of the term conspiracy theory that I'm familiar
(07:55):
with now. Of course, it's very cunning because on one hand,
it's just descriptive loan gunman theory versus conspiracy theory. On
the other hand, the term conspiracy theory makes it sound
like the people are conspiring against you. It makes it
(08:17):
sound like something a paranoid person would think, and in
that very subtle way makes conspiracy theory gives it that
little vibrating edge that you're a lunatic, right if you
believe it. But of course, it's no more rational to
assume that one person went and killed the president all
(08:39):
by themselves than it is to assume that a group
of people conspired to kill the president. In fact, you know,
that's been the case, certainly was the case of the
Lincoln assassination. Right, John Wilke's boost didn't act alone, and
in most historical events you don't see one person acting
(09:01):
in a vacuum. It would be reasonable to assume they
had help of some kind, so that, I guess set
up the opposition between official truth and conspiracy series being
(09:22):
the opposite of official truth. And it is ironic at
this point that you know, sixty years later, I think
something like seventy to seventy three percent in the last
poll that I saw of people believe in some form
of a conspiracy.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
Yeah, then in the moon landing both seem to I
feel like the king daddies of the things that we
are kind of questioning are the moon landing Kennedy nine
to eleven, and probably COVID recently, the big one.
Speaker 3 (10:00):
The New era. I think of American quote unquote conspiracy
theories in that the government is the source of the
official truth, and then the thing that disbelieves the government
is a conspiracy theory. We sort of see that from
(10:21):
the point of view of government. Of course, before that
it was common, you know, to imagine the governments lie right.
Speaker 2 (10:30):
Oh sure, But I'm kind of wondering, since you kind
of have your foot deep in the history world, is
our country the biggest it not believing what we're told
or has that been that way throughout history? In every
country feels like the people that are in charge have
got an alternative agenda as opposed to the one that
they tell you.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
Well, I would say that what made America unique for
a long time is that because we were founded on
a conspiracy as a country, right, the revolution based in
a conspiracy theory, we set up a form of government
that was itself the product of a conspiratorial mindset to
(11:22):
guard against any future tyrannical encroachment on our liberties. Right,
the Bill of Rights is a unique document. It's a
foundational document. It is the product of the American paranoia,
suspicion of power and what it intended to do to us,
(11:48):
and it you know, people are often shocked to find that,
you know, there are no formal guarantees of freedom of
speech or seeing of the press. If you go to
France or England and the government can, if they wish,
just lock you up for things so that they don't like.
In fact, that's been a traditional thing that governments do
(12:12):
in what we consider to be free democratic countries in
Europe and elsewhere. America is unique in that it has
these guarantees of individual freedoms that are foundational to how
we live. And in that sense, there wasn't really official
(12:32):
truth in America in the sense that the government could
enforce it or did enforce it until really, I'd say,
there's fifties and sixties and the Warrant Commission Report and
the birth of the term conspiracy theory, to me is
(12:53):
a sort of watershed moment, and there's a reason why
sort of every major event since then has attracted a
conspiracy theory versus a formal report. There's a nine to
eleven report, and then there's the conspiracies around nine to eleven.
(13:13):
This is a dynamic that now seems very enshrined in
American life since the sixties, and I think it has
its origin in this sort of attempt to create official
government truth by a federal government that really did threaten
(13:35):
the liberties of ordinary citizens and did have the ability
to control information on a national scale, which it certainly
does now, which was just not, you know, physically or
spiritually the case beforehand.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
So what do you think is so huge now about conspiracy?
Because if you go down that YouTube rabbit hole, the
pages that are dedicated to here's what I think is
going on here, or even you know, talking about they're
(14:18):
hiding Egyptian relics that they found inside the Grand Canyon.
All those things, like they catch so much, spread so fast,
to the point where I have to be honest. From
guest hosting the show, there's a lot of things that
I never would have thought before. But when people come
on the show and they have such convictions and they
(14:38):
go boom, boom boom, here are points I think, Okay, well,
I feel like we've been lied to recently by people
in government. So you know, there's a couple of those
that you can just see. So if A equals B,
then the rest of it could be true as well.
I wonder why it's so popular right now.
Speaker 3 (14:58):
Well, I'd say there's two reasons. The first first then,
and they're tied together. The first is this attempt to
establish and mandate official truth, which is sort of took
flight with the War and Commission report. And thereafter you
have this unceasing attempt by the federal government and its
(15:21):
agencies to command right thought to Americans, and inevitably that
right thought falls apart because it's a construction of you know,
seven people in the world is a big, weird place,
and that has eroded public trust and confidence in the
(15:43):
stories that were given. And the other thing that happened
is that we are living through an enormous technological revolution,
and it's enormous revolution in the way information moves and
has spread. I don't think there's been anything like it
since the invention of the printing press five hundred years ago.
(16:05):
And people forget, they think the invention of the printing
press was a wonderful landmark in human civilization. In it
it was, but it was also the cause of, you know,
the enormous religious wars that devastated Europe between Protestantism, a
religion that was basically created by the printing press, and
(16:29):
the Catholic Church. And the result there was one hundred
years war. It killed you know, fifty percent of the
people in Central Europe. It was more devastating than either
World War One or World War Two by a large factor. So,
(16:50):
you know, people imagine that big revolutions and technology and
the way information is transmitted are you know, simple good things,
and they made in the end be good things, but
they're incredibly disruptive things that shake up people's former understanding
of the world and introduce the chaos and the room
(17:11):
for every other kind of theory. And then human beings
work it out, and along the way, social forms get fractured,
states disappear, tens of millions of people die like that's
human history. That's normal, and we're living for a moment
like that.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Now, Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight
at one am Eastern, and go to Coast to coastam
dot com for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Let's bring in David Samuel to the show right now.
The editor of Country Highway. It's a magazine styled as
a nineteenth century American broadsheet, which he co founded. Raised
in Brooklyn, New York, Samuels is a longtime writer for Harper's,
The New Yorker in others and is known for his
mastery of new old journalism. And we're going to get
(00:26):
into some conspiracy stuff tonight. Let's bring him in right now.
As a matter of fact, let's get to the latest
conspiracy and why it's ripe for him to pick apart
as being probably not a morsel of truth in it.
Welcome to the show, David, nice to meet you.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
Thanks so much for having me. What a pleasure.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
A pleasure for me too. So the moment that the
fire start in Los Angeles, the first thing I start
hearing is that you can see three of them, are
two of them starting from a satellite from an aerial
view at the exact same time, And people are comparing
it to the fires in Hawaii and the high winds
(01:07):
and how quickly it's swept through and the biggest one
I'm hearing is that the money elites are trying to
put together a smart city and therefore the fires were
set on purpose. Do you want to talk about that
for a second, your thoughts on that one.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
I mean, I want to say first that you know
two things about conspiracy theories. The first one is that
this country is founded on a conspiracy theory, which is
that King George the third had a plot to deprive
American colonists and indeed just starting with them, all Englishmen,
(01:47):
of their traditional liberties. And that's why we had the
American Revolution was because of this deep dark plot by
evil King George the Third and his counselors. Of course,
there was no such plot. King George the Third was
a you know, maybe better, slightly better than average English king.
(02:10):
He had no plans to deprive anybody of their traditional liberties,
and indeed he never did.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
Really, I don't think I knew that. I think that's
pretty interesting the.
Speaker 3 (02:23):
American that's the American revolution. That's why we had a
revolution in this country was because of it goes back
actually to seventeenth century English Whig political theory, which positive
that the king was a sort of monster in waiting,
and in the eighteenth century American colonists claimed to believe.
(02:48):
Whether they actually did believe it as a matter of
some debate, but certainly if you read the pamphlet literature
that they tried to convince their fellow soon to be
countrymen to rebel against the crown, that's the case they made.
We are on the verge of tyranny here, and it's
(03:10):
a tyranny coming straight from London, from this evil king
and his crazed advisors. And first they're going to deprive
us of our liberties. That's why the little things the
Crown did mattered so much, which is that they were
signs of this much larger tyrannical plot. And Sam Adams
and all the Patrick Henry, the pamphleteers of the revolution,
(03:36):
you know, hammered away at this point in their pamphilet
literature leading up to the revolution, and that was the
cause of the revolution. It was fake.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Well, there seems like though, there must be a kernel
of truth in the emotion behind what fuels a conspiracy
to kind of get off the ground. In fact, us
talking about it with the crew before the show, and
I said, I wonder if this in this day and age.
If I just told you I was going to start
a conspiracy a theory about something, what would be faster
(04:12):
how it takes flight over the internet and starts catching
or you debunking it, and it goes to my theory
that I've had for a long time. It's a lot
easier to convince somebody of something that is ridiculous than
it is to tell them that they're being fooled. Do
you feel like we're that country.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
To Yeah, I think everybody is. Nobody likes to admit
that they were fooled. You know. I would also say that,
you know, my second point about conspiracy series is the
more general human point, which is that our brains are
pattern finding machines. They are made to find patterns.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
To connect the dots and.
Speaker 3 (04:57):
Connect the dots exactly. That's how we understand that, you know,
when rain falls from the sky, then plants grow. Right,
that's a conspiracy. I mean that we bit of data
that we connect to every other bit, right, is a theory.
(05:18):
It's part of a you know, the pattern. We're searching
for patterns, and the ones that prove to be useful
or true, you know, are the things that fuel are
you know, first of all our ability to to hunt,
to grow crops, to build stuff that doesn't fall down
(05:42):
to you know, so so so this is the fundament
of our existence. So we do it naturally, and it's
the thing that you know, distinguishes us from from uh
lower animals, So we'll always do it. And the third
thing that I'd say is that the term conspiracy theory
(06:08):
has a specific historical origin, which is the Warren Commission report.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
The Kennedy assassination. Which I was going to bring that
to your attention because it seems like, maybe, I don't know,
fifteen twenty years ago, you would have thought that just
what you heard the Warren Report might have been the thing.
But then now it seems like most people believe that
the CIA had a part in taking out Kennedy. Is
that part of getting conspiracy out of control or do
(06:40):
you think we're onto something there.
Speaker 3 (06:44):
Well, first, the history of the term conspiracy theory, which
is embedded in the Warren Commission report, is worth unpacking
a bit before we get to the question whether I
actually believe the Warren Commissions fair. So, the Warren Commission
(07:06):
report positive that a rone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, killed
John F. Kennedy. That was known as the rone gunman theory,
and the Warren Commission ran into significant levels of resistance
to that theory. The CIA came up with the term
(07:33):
conspiracy theory to describe in the testimony of CIA officials
the alternate theory or theories that a group of people
had conspired to kill the president. Right. That was the
first use of the term conspiracy theory that I'm familiar
(07:55):
with now. Of course, it's very cunning because on one hand,
it's just descriptive loan gunman theory versus conspiracy theory. On
the other hand, the term conspiracy theory makes it sound
like the people are conspiring against you. It makes it
(08:17):
sound like something a paranoid person would think, and in
that very subtle way makes conspiracy theory gives it that
little vibrating edge that you're a lunatic, right if you
believe it. But of course, it's no more rational to
assume that one person went and killed the president all
(08:39):
by themselves than it is to assume that a group
of people conspired to kill the president. In fact, you know,
that's been the case, certainly was the case of the
Lincoln assassination. Right, John Wilke's boost didn't act alone, and
in most historical events you don't see one person acting
(09:01):
in a vacuum. It would be reasonable to assume they
had help of some kind, so that, I guess set
up the opposition between official truth and conspiracy series being
(09:22):
the opposite of official truth. And it is ironic at
this point that you know, sixty years later, I think
something like seventy to seventy three percent in the last
poll that I saw of people believe in some form
of a conspiracy.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
Yeah, then in the moon landing both seem to I
feel like the king daddies of the things that we
are kind of questioning are the moon landing Kennedy nine
to eleven, and probably COVID recently, the big one.
Speaker 3 (10:00):
The New era. I think of American quote unquote conspiracy
theories in that the government is the source of the
official truth, and then the thing that disbelieves the government
is a conspiracy theory. We sort of see that from
(10:21):
the point of view of government. Of course, before that
it was common, you know, to imagine the governments lie right.
Speaker 2 (10:30):
Oh sure, But I'm kind of wondering, since you kind
of have your foot deep in the history world, is
our country the biggest it not believing what we're told
or has that been that way throughout history? In every
country feels like the people that are in charge have
got an alternative agenda as opposed to the one that
they tell you.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
Well, I would say that what made America unique for
a long time is that because we were founded on
a conspiracy as a country, right, the revolution based in
a conspiracy theory, we set up a form of government
that was itself the product of a conspiratorial mindset to
(11:22):
guard against any future tyrannical encroachment on our liberties. Right,
the Bill of Rights is a unique document. It's a
foundational document. It is the product of the American paranoia,
suspicion of power and what it intended to do to us,
(11:48):
and it you know, people are often shocked to find that,
you know, there are no formal guarantees of freedom of
speech or seeing of the press. If you go to
France or England and the government can, if they wish,
just lock you up for things so that they don't like.
In fact, that's been a traditional thing that governments do
(12:12):
in what we consider to be free democratic countries in
Europe and elsewhere. America is unique in that it has
these guarantees of individual freedoms that are foundational to how
we live. And in that sense, there wasn't really official
(12:32):
truth in America in the sense that the government could
enforce it or did enforce it until really, I'd say,
there's fifties and sixties and the Warrant Commission Report and
the birth of the term conspiracy theory, to me is
(12:53):
a sort of watershed moment, and there's a reason why
sort of every major event since then has attracted a
conspiracy theory versus a formal report. There's a nine to
eleven report, and then there's the conspiracies around nine to eleven.
(13:13):
This is a dynamic that now seems very enshrined in
American life since the sixties, and I think it has
its origin in this sort of attempt to create official
government truth by a federal government that really did threaten
(13:35):
the liberties of ordinary citizens and did have the ability
to control information on a national scale, which it certainly
does now, which was just not, you know, physically or
spiritually the case beforehand.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
So what do you think is so huge now about conspiracy?
Because if you go down that YouTube rabbit hole, the
pages that are dedicated to here's what I think is
going on here, or even you know, talking about they're
(14:18):
hiding Egyptian relics that they found inside the Grand Canyon.
All those things, like they catch so much, spread so fast,
to the point where I have to be honest. From
guest hosting the show, there's a lot of things that
I never would have thought before. But when people come
on the show and they have such convictions and they
(14:38):
go boom, boom boom, here are points I think, Okay, well,
I feel like we've been lied to recently by people
in government. So you know, there's a couple of those
that you can just see. So if A equals B,
then the rest of it could be true as well.
I wonder why it's so popular right now.
Speaker 3 (14:58):
Well, I'd say there's two reasons. The first first then,
and they're tied together. The first is this attempt to
establish and mandate official truth, which is sort of took
flight with the War and Commission report. And thereafter you
have this unceasing attempt by the federal government and its
(15:21):
agencies to command right thought to Americans, and inevitably that
right thought falls apart because it's a construction of you know,
seven people in the world is a big, weird place,
and that has eroded public trust and confidence in the
(15:43):
stories that were given. And the other thing that happened
is that we are living through an enormous technological revolution,
and it's enormous revolution in the way information moves and
has spread. I don't think there's been anything like it
since the invention of the printing press five hundred years ago.
(16:05):
And people forget, they think the invention of the printing
press was a wonderful landmark in human civilization. In it
it was, but it was also the cause of, you know,
the enormous religious wars that devastated Europe between Protestantism, a
religion that was basically created by the printing press, and
(16:29):
the Catholic Church. And the result there was one hundred
years war. It killed you know, fifty percent of the
people in Central Europe. It was more devastating than either
World War One or World War Two by a large factor. So,
(16:50):
you know, people imagine that big revolutions and technology and
the way information is transmitted are you know, simple good things,
and they made in the end be good things, but
they're incredibly disruptive things that shake up people's former understanding
of the world and introduce the chaos and the room
(17:11):
for every other kind of theory. And then human beings
work it out, and along the way, social forms get fractured,
states disappear, tens of millions of people die like that's
human history. That's normal, and we're living for a moment
like that.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Now, Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight
at one am Eastern, and go to Coast to coastam
dot com for more
The Best of Coast to Coast AM News
Host
George Noory
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