Love to be Richard Hofstadter and have the CIA secretly spending big money to circulate my articles decrying the populist mind and its propensity for conspiracy theories.
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In Age of Reform, Hofstadter mentions "the conspiracy theory of history" (a). That's not the same as writing about "conspiracy theories" (b). No-one disputes what McCarthyism was, the issue is how Hofstadter wrote about it. (No-one disputes that the CIA funded Encounter either.)
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It was exactly the CIA's trick (late 1960s) to resurrect the near-obsolete (term a) to smear the Warren Commission's critics as proponents of (term b). It was guilt-by-association with something far older and more dubious. But reading (b) into Hofstadter's (a) is a big mistake.
End of conversation
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