My History of Conspiracy Theory course is starting up again this week in a different format than usual, an undergraduate seminar. That I means I will be posting interesting conspiratorial bits on the blog for that course, including my vast collection of playlists that can be used to make many bitter, unsettling, though also rocking, CDs, or to really shake your IPod to its core with anti-establishment rock speculations. First up, however, some articles rounding up for students the outburst of political paranoia we have seen this summer with the rise of the Birthers, the “death panel” issue, and gun-toting dudes outside of Obama’s speeches.
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Now playing: Army Navy – Snakes of Hawaii
via FoxyTunes

. . . lived in Missouri, apparently. From local newspaper columinist T.J. Greaney, one more reason the Founders really should wonder about the quality of the p.r. representation they have been receiving. Apparently one of their recently-deceased modern legatees liked to spread his message on bathroom stalls:

In the 1960s if you entered a restroom or a phone booth, there’s a chance you might have noticed a three-inch-square sticker at eye level. A closer look might show the image of a rifle crosshairs superimposed over a menacing text:

“See that old man at the corner where you buy your papers?” the sticker read. “He may have a silencer equipped pistol under his coat. That fountain pen in the pocket of the insurance salesman that calls on you might be a cyanide gas gun. What about your milkman? Arsenic works slow but sure. … Traitors, beware! Even now the crosshairs are on the back of your necks.”

The author of this screed is Robert Bolivar DePugh, and his goal was terror. For more than a decade, DePugh led a shadowy militia group known as the Minutemen. Their stated purpose was to use guerilla warfare to repel the Communist invasion they always believed was at hand. Later, they vowed to root out Communist spies they swore were entrenched in the U.S. government. War, in their minds, was always imminent, and a group of armed patriots was the last best hope for the Republic.

“He saw himself as the Paul Revere of the 20th century, that he was going to save the United States from Communism,” said Eric Beckemeier, who grew up in DePugh’s adopted hometown of Norborne and wrote a book in 2007 chronicling his movement. “It was delusions of grandeur, almost.”

Almost? Anyway, the whole piece is well worth reading. Not exactly a heart-warming local human interest story, but also not exactly not.

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Now playing: Graham Parker & The Rumour – Stupefaction
via FoxyTunes

I imagine a lot of readers here already subscribe to H-SHEAR, the Early Republic historians’ email list, but for those who don’t, here is a notice for a bit of worthwhile historical television that is airing tonight, from Dan Feller, director of the Andrew Jackson Papers project:

This coming Monday, July 6, the PBS show “History Detectives” will air a segment featuring the work of the Andrew Jackson Papers project at the University of Tennessee Department of History.  The episode concerns a letter threatening Jackson’s assassination, signed with the name Junius Brutus Booth (a famous actor and father of Lincoln’s assassin John Wilkes Booth) and sent to Jackson on July 4, 1835.  Housed in the Library of Congress and long known to scholars, the letter has been presumed by Jackson biographers and political historians (following the lead of John Spencer Bassett, who printed it in his Correspondence of Andrew Jackson with Booth’s name in quotation marks) to be the work of a pseudonymous writer, while some Booth biographers and theater historians have accepted its authenticity but considered it a gag among friends. As “History Detectives” will show, the Jackson Papers staff were instrumental in proving that neither is correct.  Booth really wrote the letter, apparently in one of his legendary choleric rages.  He later apologized.  Killing presidents, or threatening to, seems to have run in the family.

I will be interested to see how the show handles the Booths. One of the cardinal points in my History of Conspiracy Theories course is that Lincoln’s was perhaps the only truly political assassination of all the presidential assassinations. I was not aware of the elder Booth’s threat against Jackson, but I would not have put the letter’s attribution in quotation marks. A guy named Brutus who named his son John Wilkes obviously had some extravagant, self-dramatizing ideas about fighting for freedom.

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Now playing: Mott The Hoople – Violence
via FoxyTunes

I need to finish up the Ozark travelogue soon, but first thought I would share another instance of political fantasy in real life, from a news article in our local Sunday paper. It seems that Barack Obama’s rise to power has coincided with a boom in weapons and ammunition sales (and applications to go packin’ in public) that continues to the present day. This has all developed, I might add, without the slightest hint or tell from the president or his official supporters that any kind of crackdown on gun owners is in the offing. I rather think Obama has his hands full enough leading the country through economic crises and major policy changes and a Supremes nomination without opening any new culture war fronts. Then again, you get the sense that some of the people mentioned in this story are expecting other kinds of wars entirely:

For whatever reason, guns and all things gun-related are a hot commodity these days.

Local law enforcement agencies are seeing an increase in the number of applications from residents wanting to carry concealable firearms, a continuation of a trend that started last year. At the same time, ammunition prices are up because of increased demand coinciding with more gun sales.

The Boone County Sheriff’s Department has received more than 250 new applications this year from residents wanting to carry concealable firearms after accepting 449 applications in all of 2008, sheriff’s Maj. Tom Reddin said. The sheriff’s department received only 116 applications in 2007, Reddin said.

[snip]

“I think a part of it is crime,” he said. “I think a part of it is politics and the national administration. I think a part of it is the hysteria.”

Another Columbia firearms trainer, Tim Oliver, said demand for his beginning firearms course has increased since last summer. He offered two courses a month last year but has increased that to nine courses a month. “All of my classes have been booked to capacity since October,” he said, attributing the increase to both crime and fear of stricter gun control.

Ammunition also has become a precious commodity.

“A lot of people are kind of grabbing up and hoarding ammo,” said Barry McKenzie, manager of Target Masters firing range and gun store in north Columbia.

McKenzie said a lot of dealers have placed limits on how much ammunition customers can buy in an effort to decrease demand, but his store has not.

“People are afraid” of increased federal regulations, McKenzie said “There’s just a lot of rumors out there right now.”

And then there was this additional testimony from the news story’s online comments section:

SickSigma says…

I worked for a shooting and reloading company before and after the election. Believe me, the election has a lot to do with what is going on. The call volume increased to staggering proportions immediately after the elections. People were grabbing everything they could, and that still has not subsided. Now prices are incredibly high becasue every dealer is out of stock. I am one of the lucky ones who stockpiled before prices skyrocketed. I have enough guns and ammo to form a small militia. [Let's hope it's a well-regulated militia.--JLP]

This jibes with what I was told last fall by a student who was working at what I imagine is the same business. An outfit called Midway USA has a rather unmarked facility west of Columbia. From what I have seen, there are few better places to experience Middle American cyber-aggression in action than the comments section of newspaper guns n’ crime stories.

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Now playing: Close Lobsters – Got Apprehension
via FoxyTunes

It appears that the angry white guy who shot up a children’s production of “Annie” at a Unitarian-Universalist church in Tennessee thought he was taking revenge on something that is largely a fictional creation of the conservative political media, the “liberal movement.” (As far as I can tell, the only historical group that ever actually called itself the “Liberal Movement” was a minor Australian political party from the 1970s).

A Reuter’s video covers the basics:

More explanation from the Associated Press, via the Philadelphia Daily News:

Church shooter hated ‘the liberal movement’

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. – An out-of-work truck driver accused of opening fire at a Unitarian church, killing two people, left behind a note suggesting that he targeted the congregation out of hatred for its liberal policies, including its acceptance of gays, authorities said yesterday.A four-page letter found in Jim D. Adkisson’s small SUV indicated that he intentionally targeted the Tennessee Valley Unitarian-Universalist Church because, Police Chief Sterling Owen said, “he hated the liberal movement” and was upset with “liberals in general as well as gays.”

Adkisson, 58, a truck driver, had 76 rounds with him when he entered the church and pulled a shotgun from a guitar case during a children’s performance of the musical “Annie.”

Adkisson’s ex-wife once belonged to the church but hadn’t attended in years, said Ted Jones, the congregation’s president. Police investigators described Adkisson as a “stranger” to the congregation, and police spokesman Darrell DeBusk declined to comment on whether investigators think the ex-wife’s link was a factor in the attack.

Adkisson remained jailed yesterday on $1 million bond after being charged with one count of murder. More charges are expected. Four victims were hospitalized in critical condition.

“It appears that what brought him to this horrible event was his lack of being able to obtain a job, his frustration over that, and his stated hatred for the liberal movement,” Owen said.

Adkisson was a loner who hates “blacks, gays and anyone different from him,” longtime acquaintance Carol Smallwood, of Alice, Texas, told the Knoxville News Sentinel.

The term “liberal movement” (along with similar ones) is really just a convenient way for conservatives to package together some people’s uneasiness with a wide array of social changes and turn it into a sort of conspiracy theory that can be used against a variety of political opponents. Historically, of course, the radicals who promoted some social causes originating in the 60s and 70s often hated no one worse than the liberals who had helped foster some of the older rights movements. Moreover, as we have discovered in recent Democratic primary campaigns, even moderate politicians vaguely affiliated with rights movements for different groups of people do not form any sort of cohesive unit. If there was a powerful “liberal movement” that could pull itself together, we would not have spent quite so much of the past 40 years under real or virtual GOP rule. (Note that I am not even getting into the 18th-century meaning of “liberal.)

A CNN story makes it even clear that the shooter almost quoted right-wing media talking points when explaining his actions to the police:

According to the affidavit requesting to search Adkisson’s home, the suspect told investigators liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country. Adkisson also blamed Democrats for the country’s decline, according to the affidavit.

“He felt that the Democrats had tied his country’s hands in the war on terror and they had ruined every institution in America with the aid of major media outlets,” the affidavit said. “Because he could not get to the leaders of the liberal movement … he would then target those that had voted them into office.”

Killed in the shooting were Linda Kraeger, 61, and Greg McKendry, 60, police said. Witnesses said McKendry, an usher and board member at the church, tried to shield others when he was shot, according to The Associated Press.

I imagine these Tennessee Unitarians thought they were just trying to be tolerant and welcoming to all different kinds of people, being nice and polite we call it where I come from, rather than serving an all-powerful “movement” to oppress the likes of Jim D. Adkisson.

You just can’t make this stuff up. I have long thought of the Iraq Wars and the GWOT as Cold War phantom pains, the result of Cold War institutions and Cold War thought carrying forward without an appropriate object like a competing superpower. (This is why the U.S. spends so much more time and effort going after “state sponsors of terror” than actual terrorists.) But now we discover that the military literally brought out the Cold War playbook, the Red Chinese Cold War playbook, for interrogating prisoners at Gitmo. From the New York Times:

“An Expert Reveals Chinese Origins of Interrogation Techniques at Guantánamo“

WASHINGTON — The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency. [Read the rest]

While it was astonishingly moronic to deploy techniques designed to produce false confessions in an effort to ferret out real terrorist plots, the strategy was unfortunately quite consistent with the long-time predilections of the American Right and the U.S. government. There seems to be a part of the right-wing brain that is deeply attracted to the sort of “brutalitarian” (Joe McCarthy’s word) excesses it likes to detect and denounce in its enemies. During the Cold War, U.S. officials across the political spectrum repeatedly concluded that they needed to “fight fire with fire” and employ tactics as or nearly as harsh and devious as a Communist enemy that was seen as colossally evil. satanically ruthless, and unnaturally effective.

The article correctly relates the Air Force study to the “brainwashing” controversy of the 1950s, during which the government and the larger culture gave itself a panic attack over the apparent conversion of captive Korean War soldiers to Communism. In true fire with fire spirit, the CIA and other entities paid for both propaganda about the horrors of Communist brainwashing techniques and also for secret research that tried to duplicate those techniques for American use. The nature of the techniques was a subject regarding which a host of pulpy mind-control fantasies were spun and researched, involving hypnotism, telepathy, and most of all drugs. [Click the images at the bottom for an example of the propaganda. The brainwashing expert whose speeches are being advertised, Edward Hunter, worked for the CIA.] It was in pursuit of such a magic elixir that the CIA did things like try to corner the world market on LSD and then hand out supplies of it to secretly-funded university laboratories. You can read all about it in John Marks’s jaw-dropping book, The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate.” What I was most shocked by was how little actually came of the CIA’s mind-control research. According to Marks, they never figured out how to make anybody do anything other than by sheer coercion or blackmail. Truth serum and zombie-like sleeper agents and hypnotic programming are such well-developed concepts that people tend to believe there must be something to them that the movies just exaggerate, but it seems that vampires and werewolves might actually be on about the same level of factuality.

What the NYT article does not quite explain is that the Albert Biderman study the Gitmo trainers drew on came from a more level-headed social scientific approach to the “brainwashing” issue that essentially debunked it, explaining that the confessions and conversions that the Chinese and Soviets got were achieved not through drugs or hypnotism but good old-fashioned police brutality and bureaucratic manipulation. I guess this lesson must have hung around in some military intelligence and right-wing circles ever since. Biderman also may have supplied the idea that, while brutal and deplorable, the methods he described were used by Communist governments specifically as alternatives to more traditional forms of torture. So, when today’s lefties and libertarians complain about the Bush administration creating its own gulag, we now know that that it is almost literally true.

That maxim about Democrats falling out and Republicans falling into line never seemed truer than today, at least the second part, as Pastor John Hagee tosses out huge chunks of his own evangelical Protestant theology, preached by him on countless, often televised occasions, because its open anti-Catholicism might hurt John McCain’s campaign. Josh Marshall’s headline says it all: “Hagee: Just Kidding! ” Here is most of the Wall Street Journal’s report:

Washington Wire – WSJ.com : McCain Backer John Hagee Apologizes to Catholics
McCain Backer John Hagee Apologizes to Catholics

John Hagee, the controversial Evangelical pastor who endorsed John McCain, will issue a letter of apology to Catholics today for inflammatory remarks he has made, including accusing the Roman Catholic Church of supporting Adolf Hitler and calling it “The Great Whore.” (See a copy of the letter PDF.)

“Out of a desire to advance greater unity among Catholics and Evangelicals in promoting the common good, I want to express my deep regret for any comments that Catholics have found hurtful,” Hagee wrote, according to an advanced copy of the letter reviewed by Washington Wire. “After engaging in constructive dialogue with Catholic friends and leaders, I now have an improved understanding of the Catholic Church, its relation to the Jewish faith, and the history of anti-Catholicism.”

In the letter, addressed to Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League and one of Hagee’s biggest critics, Hagee pledges “a greater level of compassion and respect for my Catholic brothers and sisters in Christ.”

Hagee met with 22 Catholic leaders in Washington on Friday to apologize for his comments, according to a source familiar with the meeting. Despite the McCain’s condemnation of Hagee’s anti-Catholic remarks, the campaign had no role in that meeting or Tuesday’s apology, according to the source who said it was something Hagee did because he felt it was necessary.

Donohue is expected to release a letter in response today, accepting Hagee’s apology. The Catholic leader slammed both Hagee and McCain in February, releasing a statement titled “McCain Embraces Bigot.”

“For the past few decades, [Hagee] has waged an unrelenting war against the Catholic Church,” Donohue wrote then. The Catholic League also compiled a bullet-point list on things they object to about Hagee titled “Veteran Bigot.”

Hagee’s letter explains some of the harsh words he has used when describing the Catholic Church. “I better understand that reference to the Roman Catholic Church as the ‘apostate church’ and the ‘great whore’ described in the book of Revelation” — both terms Hagee has employed — “is a rhetorical device long employed in anti-Catholic literature and commentary,” he wrote.

I have made a decision this semester to retire my long-running “Conspiracy Theories and Conspiracies in American History and Culture” course, at least for a while. My heart has been less and less in it since 9/11 and even more so since the start of Iraq War.  Conspiracy theories and some real conspiracies obviously were involved in both of those events and their aftermaths, but they also make me too sad and angry to adopt the bemused, frankly 1990s-based  perspective that the course really requires.

The students in it also seem to have changed, or at least the times have changed around them. I spend 98% of the lecture time debunking conspiracy theories or analyzing them as historical texts, but increasingly I have come to feel that students are taking it for all the wrong reasons: sometimes because they want to believe in conspiracy theories themselves, but more often because they want American history and culture to be a kind of pop-culture lark they can use to while away some spring afternoons.

It’s the same sort of fundamental un-seriousness that is wrecking our current political process. Did I mention that my class is generally full of seniors and juniors from MU’s journalism school, which I am told is very highly regarded and certainly seems to find media jobs for most of its graduates?

Via a reader blog at Talking Points Memo, I just found one of the better summary descriptions of this un-serious attitude and its consequences for the presidential race. The piece comes from a local columnist in Terre Haute, Indiana. Terre Haute is not much of a place to look at or try to find a place to have dinner in, but it did help bring the world Eugene Debs and Larry Bird, so it has a certain tradition. The column is posted in full below, some after the jump.

STEPHANIE SALTER: Election 2008: What would the Trilateral Commission do?

TERRE HAUTE — A friend who teaches in public school here in Indiana was appalled not long ago when an e-mail from a colleague went out to everyone in the school’s cyber-address book.

The subject of the e-mail was Barack Obama and how he is “secretly” a radical Muslim bent on destroying the United States from within. A widely circulated pack of lies — e.g., he took the oath of office holding a Koran — the e-mail boasts that its contents are verifiable on the legitimate myth buster, snopes.com, which is the opposite of true.

At least my teacher friend’s colleague didn’t send out one of the popular e-mails that insist Obama shows all the signs of being the antichrist.

I wish I could say I was kidding, but I can’t. I live in the United States of America — a country in which most people are alleged to be literate — and I am about to participate in a historic presidential primary. But I am starting to wonder if some of my fellow citizens have a grasp on reality, let alone the issues.

A jihadist? The antichrist? Oh, for God’s sake.

Before anyone is tempted to play the region card, don’t. Indiana has no exclusive claim to people who are spending time this spring telling one another that Obama is a jihadist and/or the antichrist. Google offers about 2.25 million hits on the latter subject. (Mercifully, renunciations are part of the volume.)

The hearty existence of these and similar crusades points up a reality of contemporary American life: We are divided between the people who are inclined toward conspiracies, superstition, black-and-white explanations, pigeon holes and cheap sentimentality masquerading as “patriotism” — and the people who are not so inclined.

While many of those with an aversion to investigation and critical thought processes identify themselves as “conservatives,” there are liberal conspiracy theorists aplenty to demonstrate that twisted thinking is an equal opportunity affliction.

To see lefty conspiracies on display, one only need read the wild and crazy ideas about why a HuffingtonPost blogger shared her personal impressions of the Obama fundraiser in San Francisco, now known as “Bittergate.” The most popular: Hillary Clinton secretly paid her to do it.

Even among people who don’t buy Trilateral Commission plots, there is a decided intellectual shallowness in fashion this year. Across the land, from the blogosphere to the town hall meeting, too many axes are grinding and too many enemy camps are hunkered down. Among people of both major parties and many minor ones, 30-minute policy statements have been freeze-dried into four-word catch phrases, and complex humans have been reduced to cut-out characters who wear halos or horns.

Last month, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York columnist actually cited leftover waffles and french fries as evidence of Obama’s inability to connect strongly enough with voters to vanquish Clinton from the Democratic race.

In the same essay, the columnist referred to Clinton’s continued quest of the nomination as “the Attack of the 50 Foot Woman” and called her criticisms of Obama “emasculating.”

Half-eaten waffles, sci-fi movie characters and sexist stereotypes? Is everything, including a presidential race, just another variation on Simon Cowell or the “Left Behind” series?

Eight years ago, millions of voters chose as president a former boozer who “seems like he’d be fun to have a beer with.” Didn’t we learn anything about the dangers of superficiality from this reversal of style over substance?

What in the world has happened to our B.S. detectors? We can’t find enough obvious differences among presidential candidates that we must resort to misogynistic name calling and invisible ties to al Qaida or Satan?

Why can’t we just use what is before our very own eyes?
(more…)

I can still remember my astonishment upon first learning in a social history course that labor unions, even very loosely-organized early proto-unions and their chief tactics (such as agreeing not to work until wages were increased) were once considered criminal conspiracies by American courts. For a long time, this was one of my key personal historical examples, just after coverture, the law of slavery, and the recruiting and disciplinary practices of the British navy, of the barbarities that were considered perfectly normal and legal in my chosen period of study.

As I am sure most early American historians but perhaps not all blog readers know, the Philadelphia Cordwainers case of 1806 (Commonwealth v. Pullis) was the key moment in establishing what one would have to call the conspiracy theory of labor discipline. While Christopher Tomlins has shown that the conspiracy doctrine evolved considerably over the 19th century, declining in some respects, labor organizing was not fully legalized and de-conspiracized until the middle of the 20th century.

Now comes the news, to me, anyway, that Smithfield Foods (hams, Mandrake, Christmas hams!) has been trying to revive the tactic in form of invoking the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statutes, the same ones that have devastated the Mafia, in legal action against the United Food and Commercial Workers. The UFCW has apparently done little more than try to organize Smithfield and give their labor practices some creative bad publicity. According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch,

Frustrated by years of legal delays, the UFCW began embracing a new organizing strategy in 2006. It held informational pickets at stores that sold Smithfield products. It sought nonbinding resolutions of support from city governments in traditional union strongholds such as New York and Boston.

It also began protesting appearances by celebrity chef Paula Deen, who has a promotional contract with Smithfield Foods. And they published information on the Internet that is widely available to consumers and activists. Part of the company’s racketeering complaint cites a union activist who criticized Ms. Deen by quoting from “The Jungle,” muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair’s classic novel about the meat-packing industry.

According to one of the company’s lawyers, “It’s actually the same thing as what John Gotti used to do.” Except, you know, for the beatings and shootings and all those other, you know, crimes.

Read the UFCW’s side of the story here.

For the perspective of an early American historian, one of the more glaring facts about American politics and culture is the hostility between Catholics and evangelical Protestants. From Pope’s Day to the Charlestown convent riots to the Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk to the Know-Nothings, anti-Catholicism was part of the fabric of American life from colonial times through the Civil War and beyond, especially in the North.

Confessional identity was also perhaps the most durable faultline in American politics, rivaling and often trumping slavery and other issues. Immigration became controversial chiefly to the extent that the immigrants held non-Protestant religious views; hence nativism emerged as a potent political force in the 1840s when Irish Catholics, driven out of their homeland by the potato famine, began arriving in large numbers and made Catholics a major U.S. demographic for the first time. The Democrats generally welcomed Catholic voters and preached tolerance of their cultural particularities, the Whigs and Republicans (the GOP), with their base among northern evangelical voters, not so much. Temperance and other evangelical efforts to impose middle-class Protestant lifestyles on immigrants and laborers were among the most bitter aspects of this early partisan “culture war.”

However, American anti-Catholicism went well beyond the personal habits of Irish workers, and beyond even the obvious theological differences between Catholics and Protestants. It was also a political belief system predicated on idea that the Vatican was an evil, tyrannical institution would never rest until it had destroyed religious and political liberty wherever it existed. Most particularly the Church was thought to be bent on subverting and conquering the United States: the millions of new Catholic voters were feared to be under the absolute control of priests and bishops who were preparing for the day when their legions could vote democracy and Protestantism out of existence. In this view, it was particularly sinister that Catholics were raising money and rapidly founding churches, schools, and colleges in North America, especially in the west (the present Midwest). These activities were seen as creating the infrastructure of the new Catholic America intended to supplant or dominate the old one. In this context, the appointment of a Catholic postmaster general (James Campbell during the Pierce administration) was seen as the beginnings of an attempt to seize the communications system. Telegraph inventor and leading citizen Samuel F.B. Morse, a rabid conspiracy theorist in addition to his other accomplishments, laid it all out in the many editions of his book, Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States, a conspiracy favorite even today. The influence of anti-Catholic conspiracy theory can be seen in this perfectly mainstream political cartoon from 1855:

Obviously much has changed in American politics since the 185os. The modern Republican party, exploiting the abortion issue and other forms of reaction against the post-1960s revolution in gender relations and sexuality, has managed to cross or blur the traditional politico-religious boundary and attract significant numbers of Catholic votes to go along with its evangelical Protestant base. A very different breed of evangelicalism, with its heartland in the South rather than New England, is the bulwark of the GOP base. This new alliance depends on the two groups, Catholics especially, overlooking or forgetting the long heritage of American anti-Catholicism. This is not too difficult. In my experience teaching early American history and the history of conspiracy theory to Missouri undergraduates, many, many of them out of Catholic high schools in the St. Louis area, “forgetting” anti-Catholicism seems to be the norm. It genuinely seems to come as news to the Catholic kids that their religion was once so heavily hated and feared.

A more serious obstacle to continued alliance of Catholics and evangelical Protestants, is the apocalyptic theology of the most conservative and politically active modern evangelical groups. Modern evangelicals don’t openly embrace Morse-style conspiracy theories, but, as prominent GOP supporter Pastor John Hagee explains in the film clip I linked to earlier, they do cast the Catholic Church as one of the major villains — the false church or “Great Whore” — in their favorite end times scenario.

This all hit the news, at too low a level, last week. Apparently in response to the innuendo about Barack Obama’s non-relationship with the anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan, the conservative Catholic League has suddenly noticed that presumptive nominee John McCain, along with virtually every other major Republican candidate, has shared stages with and accepted the active, fulsome, and lucrative support of virulent evangelical anti-Catholics, like Pastor Hagee.

I am not sure where this will all lead, but it is interesting to have such an age-old faultline reassert itself in a new form after so many years away.