Crossposted with the Center for American Progress. With Mickey Ehrlich
On November 19, emails stolen from scientists at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England were leaked onto the web. Conservatives immediately claimed that these proved global warming to be a hoax and part of a worldwide conspiracy run by mad scientists who have quashed debate in order to institute a socialist, business-killing cap-and-trade policy. Thus was yet another conservative conspiracy theory in the age of Obama launched: "Climategate." It's getting hard to keep track of all of them.
We have written in this space about the promotion of baseless beliefs regarding President Obama's birth and the authorship of his books. And while much of the mainstream media continues to ignore the conspiratorial nature of contemporary conservative politics' arguments, the true leaders of the conservative movement in America--Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and the like--have been leading the charge for these conspiracies and many more.
Conservative websites and airwaves abound with conspiracy theories to the point where it becomes nearly a full-time job to merely keep up with the various and secretive forces seeking to undermine our country and turn us into--well, it's never quite clear. Terrorists? Communists? Socialists? Gays? Whatever...
You can read the rest of Eric Alterman and Mickey Ehrlich's analysis in their recent article, "Think Again: A Climate of Conspiracy" Eric Alterman is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College. He is also a Nation columnist and a professor of journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. His seventh book, Why We're Liberals: A Handbook for Restoring America's Most Important Ideals, was recently published in paperback. He occasionally blogs at http://www.thenation.com/blogs/altercation and is a regular contributor to The Daily Beast. Mickey Ehrlich is a freelance writer based in New York.