Publishers Weekly
08/22/2022
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. (Oct.)
Library Journal
10/01/2022
Bowlin, Matt Frederick, and Noel Brown bring their podcast to print, examining conspiracy theories and bizarre conjectures. They seek to answer why the government would lie, how conspiracy theories get traction with the general public, and what the average person can do to dig out the truth. Biological warfare (weaponized deer ticks?) and UFOs (Roswell?) share space with factual information on the Tuskegee Study and verified experiments that exposed unknowing New York City subway riders to purportedly harmless chemicals. VERDICT Readable and interesting, with spots of wry humor. Sources are generally referenced in text or footnotes, leaving readers free to agree or disagree and research further in response to the authors' conclusions.
Kirkus Reviews
2022-08-26
The hosts of the titular podcast translate their investigations to the page.
Among a spate of new books about virally strange ideas, among them Michael Shermer’s rather more insightful study Conspiracy, this one has a pointed purpose: By exposing bad and dangerous ideas while acknowledging their origins, the authors seek “to arm you with knowledge”—and, of course, knowledge is power. Aside from ignorance, the herd mentality, and bad-faith grifters, there’s also this stark truth: “Your government is lying to you.” Considering the web of lies surrounding the Trump administration, for instance, it’s no surprise that there’s a prevailing narrative that Trump operates behind a smoke screen in order to fight the “Deep State” and the dark forces that seek to enslave America, “the core claim of the QAnon conspiracy theory.” As the authors enumerate, behind weird paranoiac bugaboos such as chemtrails and UFOs, there have been numerous secret military tests repeatedly disavowed and then revealed to be true. Black Americans, in particular, have reason to be concerned that biowarfare is being waged on them. In addition to the shameful Tuskegee experiments, it’s true that AIDS, Covid-19, and other catastrophic diseases have taken a disproportionate toll on Black communities, a fact likely better attributed to systemic racism and classism than to a malicious government-backed origin. Feel spied on? You should, and there’s a truth behind it. Thanks to data monitoring, “a growing percentage of the US population—the vast majority—has simply given over access to their personal lives.” We are manipulated, lied to, and bought and sold—a particular bête noire of the authors is the adman Edward Bernays, propagandist extraordinaire—and scarcely have control over our destinies. Small wonder, then, that people believe in the bizarre.
A page-turning book to give to someone who believes in pizza pedophilia or that the Illuminati rule the world.
