Peter Knight's Conspiracy Culture

Conspiracy theories have had an extensive history in all parts of the world. However, the United States in particular has had conspiracy theories intertwined with their politics and popular culture to a greater extent than most countries. Peter Knight addresses this in his book, Conspiracy Culture: From Kennedy to The X-Files. Within his piece, Knight examines conspiracy culture and how it became a regular feature of everyday political and cultural life after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November, 1963. Kennedy’s death created a sense of uncertainty, strangeness and skepticism about America, making the assassination a contributor to a widespread sense of paranoia. Kennedy’s assassination was significant to the postmodern

Conspiracy theories are also able to point to real problems within society, especially in relation to the government and American’s question of legal authority. In each chapter of Knight’s work, he examines a different aspect of contemporary conspiracy culture and how it can apply to this new way of thinking that occurred after the post-modern shift. He addresses this shift throughout the book, particularly in the introduction of the text. For example, he claims that: “The style of conspiracy has accordingly changed from a rigid conviction about a particular demonized enemy, to a cynical and generalized sense of ubiquity…conspiring forces in a world in which everything is connected” (Knight, 3). This post-modern shift is caused by suspicious societal thinking. This became evident when many theories about President Kennedy’s assassination started to develop and were widely discussed amongst the population as well as within mainstream media, which led to the sense of ubiquity that Knight is referring to. In the beginning of the book, Knight gets straight to the point and argues that the concept of conspiracy, whether it be one’s individual thinking or a theory, cannot be understood anymore as upfront evidence

He is able to explore the many movements and conspiracy theories that developed after Kennedy’s assassination and how they were able to change this anxiety and skepticism about conspiracy theories. In Chapter One, Knight summarizes the broad changes in the style as well as the function of conspiracy thinking since the 1960s. He goes on to say that this transition likely happened due to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, which then lead to a reconfigured form of popular paranoia and what can now be known as Postmodern Culture (Knight, 75). In Chapter Two, Knight goes further in-depth about the Kennedy assassination and examines the connection between paranoia and America during postmodernity. He shows his readers how conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination are central to accounts of the legitimation crisis of authority, also known as an identity crisis, in which the confidence in governmental institutions and legal authority are lost. Knight argues that is was this initial moment of trauma that diminished the nation’s innocence and anxiety about conspiracy theories. In Chapters Three and Four, Knight explores how conspiracy thinking shaped feminist and racial perspectives, two new social movements that occurred after the death of Kennedy. By incorporating these into his book, Knight is able to apply theories such as Hofstadter’s to once again present the shift that