Quotes from Jesse Walker

This is a book about America's demons. Many of those demons are imaginary, but all of them have truths to tell us. A conspiracy story that catches on becomes a form of folklore. It says something true about the anxieties and experiences of the people who believe and repeat it, even if it says nothing true about the objects of the theory itself.

When you think you're pursuing a divine destiny, it's not hard to find yourself watching for all the other invisible forces out there: darker, more dangerous powers who don't want your holy mission to succeed.

But it also declares that political paranoia is "the preferred style only of minority movements"—and, just to marginalize that minority some more, that it has "a greater affinity for bad causes than good.

This curious coalition of Muslims and Marxists had picked Watts, Allen wrote, because blacks were actually rather well off there: "[I]f Watts could be exploded they could do it anywhere else in America." So they had flooded the area with propaganda, most notably a "publicity campaign rivaling the Advertising Council's promotion of Smokey the Bear" aimed at "the construction of the myth of police brutality." With

gruesome version of that tale reappeared in Atlanta during the child murders of 1979 to 1981, when at least twenty-one black children and teenagers (and a handful of young adults) were kidnapped and killed. According to one rumor, the government was harvesting the kids' genitals to make aphrodisiacs.

The eightfold path of what a witch must master to be a powerful witch—that's the symbol of Denny's.

In the twenty-first century, rank-and-file Republicans attack their enemies as the puppets of the billionaire George Soros while rank-and-file Democrats attack their enemies as the puppets of the billionaires Charles and David Koch. We're told that only the fringe believes in the Enemy Above, yet tales of his machinations have become a routine part of partisan politics. The Devil's cleverest trick is to persuade you that hardly anyone believes he exists.