re: #32 Aceofwhat?

are you sure you don’t underestimate the extent to which it has always been thus? from communist infiltration to manchurian candidates to new world orders…i’ll bet the percentage hasn’t changed as much as the CT du jour…

It isn’t really quantifiable but the subject is under very serious study by all sorts of scholars, anthropologists, historians, psychologists, and folklore analysts.
There is no doubt conspiracy theories have always been popular among certain subcultures and social classes:

The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts. He ascribes all his failure to get on in the world, all of his congenital incapacity and damfoolishness, to the machinations of werewolves assembled in Wall Street, or some other such den of infamy (H.L. Mencken, 1936)

Conspiracy theories of one kind or another have been a necessary component of all modern totalitarian governments.

Even so, the mainstreaming of conspiracy theory is almost certainly something new, at least in the democratic west. Somebody like Alex Jones would not have had a major network platform in the 80s, for example. In the 60s, the John Birch Society’s elaborate conspiracy theories were an object of ridicule in the larger culture. Belief in conspiracy theories was popular at least from early modern times but until very recently they were always part of folklore, the mythology of the insignificant. With a few notable exceptions like the Anti-Masonic Party, they played little or no role in the larger ebb and flow of real world politics.