How the internet ruined conspiracy theories by Rob Long Print this article
Years ago, a friend of mine found himself in the ballroom of a run-down New Orleans hotel at a meeting for conspiracy theorists of President John F. Kennedy s assassination.
He was doing research for a screenplay he was working on and found out about the group from a smudgy, cheaply photocopied flyer pinned up on a bulletin board in a radical bookstore.
That’s the way conspiracy theorists and radicals of all stripes used to connect to each other, back in the days before the internet. They’d hang around some scruffy bookstore someplace with an evocative and dog-whistle kind of name, such as “Sacco & Vanzetti Books and Co.” or “Free Your Mind Books & News” or “Fellow Travelers Bookshelf” and bump into each other near the shelves where they kept the books proving that the Great Pyramid of Giza was built by ancient astronauts, or something equally far-out and ludi