This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Saturday, October 17th, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The conspiracies run hot around this White House.

Jesse Walker, author of The United States of Paranoia,

says it's easy for us to say that this, right now,

is the golden age of conspiratorial thinking.

And yet, he argues widespread politically impactful conspiracy theories have been with us and our politics for a very long time.

The president has 87 million Twitter followers and just as I was setting up this recording with you this week

the president tweeted out a story that made some very strange claims. I believe this was from a QAnon conspiracy account that

Osama bin Laden was not killed by Seal Team 6, that in fact it was a body double, and that

members of SEAL Team 6 had then been killed by the previous administration.

That seems insane.

I gather there are some intense debates going on now

between the defenders of SEAL Team 6 who want to say no they really did

get this pill even though we hate Obama versus the people who are saying no no no it was all a great fraud.

But yes it's it's not one of the plausible conspiracy theories you might run into from

time to time even if it has been

apparently embraced for this moment, this morning at least,

by the President of the United States.

So when we hear conspiracy theories thrown out there, but first of all we have to admit, as even

Robert Anton Wilson, the great connoisseur of conspiracy theories, would admit, there are a lot of conspiracies

out there.

...