So, I knew that None Dare Call it Conspiracy was, along with Cleon Skousen’s The Naked Communist, one of the ur-texts of the Tea Party/Glenn Beck paranoid right. And indeed all the good stuff’s there: Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy theories about the Rothschilds, UN world government, politically and historically illiterate claims that Fascism is left wing, the gold standard, a stab-in-the-back myth about Vietnam, etc. What I didn’t realize, though, is that the book names, as front-man for this Illuminati plot, Richard Nixon. This actually makes some crazy sense: the initial attempt at a far-right takeover of the Republican party was Goldwater’s failed presidential run in 1964; as a response, in 1968 the Republican establishment chose Nixon as the anti-Goldwater, while Goldwater’s supporters retrenched and rallied behind Reagan, giving us, eventually, the far-right fringe of the Republican party today.
