Conspiracy Theory Today -- starters for 2009 students

Deep Thoughts about Conspiracy Theory and "Right-Wing Rage"

• Washington Post writer Rick Perlstein, "In America, Crazy Is a Preexisting Condition: Birthers, Town Hall Hecklers and the Return of Right-Wing Rage"
• New York Times columnist Frank Rich invokes early 1960s "liberal consensus" scholars Daniel Bell and Richard Hofstadter: "The Guns of August"
• Article cited by Rich, and a good companion to Hofstadter's Paranoid Style: Daniel Bell, "The Dispossessed,"from The Radical Right (1962)

Continuity of anti-Obama groups back to McVeigh era:

• Heavily-Armed '90s Militia, Linked To Anti-Obama Activist, Resisted 'New World Order' | TPMMuckraker

Death Panelists and Birthers

• NYT blogger Timothy Egan on "Palin's Poison"
• NYT on familiar source of "death panel" rumors
• Jon Stewart grills the originator of the "death panel" charge -- a historian!
  

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• Conservative writer David Frum wonders whether Birthers are proof that our culture has lost its immunity to lunacy
• Spencer Kornhaber, "Meet Orly Taitz, Queen Bee of People Obsessed With Barack Obama's Birth Certificate," OC Weekly

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