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I complain a lot about books (and movies) being overwritten, but “Conspiracy” is the first book in a very long time I wanted to re-edit – in-book, with a marker – and read again. Because as long as he’s staying on topic (the conspiracy to sue Gawker out of business), Ryan Holiday’s book is awesome. He competently lays the foundation and tells you the story in just about as complete a fashion as you could hope for. It happens again and again; the names change. Sometimes it’s the Catholics, sometimes it’s the Jews, sometimes it’s the satanists, sometimes it’s the socialists or the anarchists. But it recurs with enough frequency that I began to see it as something that gets deployed almost on cue when certain moments arise in American history.” Enter GamerGate and the culture wars and then the 2016 election, and the judgment against Gawker became fraught with implications that went well beyond the politics of outing and whether or not it's okay to publish someone's sex video without their consent. Don DeLillo, after extensive reading of the 26 supporting volumes to the Warren report, presented Oswald in his 1988 novel, Libra, as the stooge of a CIA attempt to promote war with Cuba. James Ellroy’s American Tabloid(1995) begins with Castro’s coup and ends with the Dallas assassination, which the novel attributes to a conspiracy involving the Cuban interests of the CIA and the mafia.
You see that with 9/11 conspiracy theories and you see it with the JFK assassination. The idea that the head of state was assassinated and yet, for a large part of the population, the only explanation was that the government itself in some form or another was responsible for this is representative of that sea change.” Bollea was genuinely crushed by all these events. When he sued Gawker, though, he didn't really have a hope of winning. He wasn't nearly rich enough to take on the Gawker empire. Until Peter Thiel came along. Re-read and a radical shift of my opinion. I jumped to conclusions too soon first time round. I finally get this book! Until recently, exhibits at University museums and family narratives represented the Stanfords as an ideal nuclear unit destroyed by the tragic death of Leland, Jr., at age 15 from typhoid fever. Jane Stanford devoted the rest of her life to honoring her son by creating a great university. I’ve long been a fan of Ryan Holiday, so take that for what it’s worth, but I believe this to be yet another book that seeks to enlighten and educate.Vice-president Lyndon Baines Johnson takes the presidential oath of office in Dallas, Texas, two hours after Kennedy was shot. Photograph: Reuters Five years later, January 6 and its aftermath crystalized another reality: Trump found fair and free elections useless. He and his allies had grown weary of democracy. After all, they had lost. While there certainly was intrigue, I did find the pace slower than I expected, especially with Ryan Holiday re-iterating multiple times the ideas around conspiracies and what happens when people feel wronged/vengeful, rather than focusing on the details of the story. A conspiracy theory is an explanation of an event or situation that invokes a conspiracy by sinister and powerful actors, often political in motivation, when other explanations are more probable. The term has a pejorative connotation, implying that the appeal to a conspiracy is based on prejudice or insufficient evidence. Conspiracy theories resist falsification and are reinforced by circular reasoning: both evidence against the conspiracy and an absence of evidence for it, are re-interpreted as evidence of its truth, and the conspiracy becomes a matter of faith rather than proof. The prominence of Mexico and Cuba in the Kennedy books means that those countries are likely to be among the most frequently searched words in the latest archive release. And those of us who find The Tears of Autumn the most plausible explanation of the assassination will look with particular interest at any CIA documentation dealing with Diem’s death.
It does succeed in being reflective though — causing you to think: is it ever right to seek revenge when you've been hurt? Is it right to destroy an individual or institution that you think is incredibly damaging or hurtful to a wide range of people? The word 'conspiracy' tends to be viewed as automatically 'bad', but Ryan forces his reader to question that. Ultimately, I remain unconvinced with Ryan's hypothesis that we need more conspiracies in the world than we currently have. But when it was revealed that billionaire Peter Thiel was behind Hogan's lawsuit, essentially providing infinite funds in a deliberate effort to destroy Gawker, opinion turned. Thiel was not beloved by the media, and the fact that he was a libertarian, and later a Trump supporter, cast the case in a new light for many. Now it was a story about a vengeful billionaire crushing the freedom of the press for hurting his feelings.For some reason the author frequently writes in the present tense. For example (not a real quote, just to illustrate), "In 2012, Thiel goes to the store. He sees his rival, and debates what to say." Perhaps it's my historian bias, but this tense just seemed wrong and distracting. The problem with this book is at the very end, he suddenly turns it into an opinion piece on his belief that the Trump presidency is a disaster and proves more and more a disaster every day that passes...
This is his first bit of journalism. He does a good job investigating and telling the story about a real, honest to goodness conspiracy. The author gets there in the end, but there was too much hand-wringing in my opinion about why people virulently reacted negatively once's Thiel's role in the Gawker takedown became revealed. Not that complicated... From MMR to Covid-19, vaccines have been a prime example of how initially reasonable concerns over possible side-effects can career into an insidious irrationality.As Stevens sees it, the late Weimar Republic and the US today have plenty in common. As was the case 90 years ago, democracy could be made expendable, particularly if the donor class goes along for the ride. He quotes Mitch McConnell, the living embodiment of the Republican establishment, the Senate majority leader when Trump won the White House. With hindsight, McConnell sounds clueless, oblivious to the approaching storm. The last time the GOP won the popular vote was in 2004, and before that 1988. Seeking to return to office, Trump has threatened the media with charges of treason and hankered for the execution of Gen Mark Milley, the former chair of the joint chiefs of staff.
The founding of Stanford University, however, was fraught with conflicts between Jane Stanford, who was obsessed with the spiritual world that she consulted to make academic decisions, and David Starr Jordan, the University’s founding President, who appointed his favorites and sycophants to the faculty. Most publications have been sceptical of this finding. On the Trail of the Assassins by Jim Garrison (1988), a Louisiana lawyer, and L Fletcher Prouty’s JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F Kennedy (1992), featured key source material for Oliver Stone’s movie JFK(1991), which suggested that the president was executed by a vast cabal of businessmen, gangsters, politicians, soldiers, Cuban dissidents and spooks. I think we’re much more likely to change [Trump] because if he is president, he’s going to have to deal with the sort of the right-of-center world, which is where most of us are,” McConnell told CNBC.
The Best Conspiracy Books
Propaganda by Edward Bernays is the oldest conspiracy book on the list, originally written in 1928. The book outlines the psychology of manipulating the masses through the technique of public communication. Bernays is viewed by many media historians as the father of public relations. Noam Chomsky stated that: Ultimately it’s not about the key players, it’s about our history and the history of conspiracy, as an act. It’s a story of a modern day conspiracy and the players happen to be Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and Peter Thiel. But it’s more than that. It’s about our world and our current landscape, political and social. Anna Gooding-Call is a librarian and writer originally from rural central New York. She got her BA in the city that inspired "The Twilight Zone" and confirms that the hitchhikers really are weird there. Today, she lives in Massachusetts with her wife and two cats. It’s basically very structurally similar to the contemporary conspiracy theory around Pizzagate or the movie that just came out, Sound of Freedom [popular with QAnon followers]. This idea of the cabal of sexual abusers, which was being used against Catholics in the 1830s, with just a few of the key details changed but more or less the same narrative.” Most contributions to the JFK book depository have fingered at least some of the figures in the Garrison-Prouty conspiracy theory. The most recurrent prime suspect has been Cuba, which had been infuriated by the Bay of Pigs operation – Kennedy’s failed attempt to depose the Castro dictatorship through a CIA-run invasion by Cuban exiles. The communist island also features in Oswald’s still-mysterious trip, weeks before the Kennedy shooting, to Mexico City, where he apparently hoped to secure a visa to defect to Cuba.
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