The Call to Action: pp. 82

 I think, dear reader, we have entered the final chapter of this book. Probably, it's hard to say but given that this chapter is titled: "You are the Answer," I think I have a good assumption here. My only problem is that I'm still not quite sure what the question is supposed to be. You might want to accuse me of being dense, "he's saying that there is a massive conspiracy to throw the United States into COMMUNISM, duh."

I get that, but he has not made this case so far. He thinks he has, so we have to assume this counter-factual. Meaning that we are going to pretend for the sake of argument that this position of his has been made and is logically sound and valid. It's a big ask, I know, but we pretend that Iron Man's suit made sense for a solid decade we can do this together. 

Now, I have to give credit where it is due, and Allen's call to action is actually well written. In the first paragraph of the chapter, he is both impressing upon the reader the need for action but also being sympathetic towards those that feel they can't do it. The problem for this group of people is that they've read this book and while Allen writes, "After reading this book, some will bemoan the fact that the situation is hopeless."

Yeah, because Allen has been basically saying that these people are beyond the reach of the law for the entire book. I mentioned this in an earlier post, using a personal experience, but one thing that Allen has right is that David Rockefeller is not going to jail for anything. He could shoot a person in the middle of a party and would never see the inside of a holding center. That's not because he secretly controls the media and the courts--but because of a culture that values money and a political system that relies on it. What Allen is claiming is the first part--that Rockefeller and the like are untouchable because they have this literal control. 

So it's quite a mystery when he claims that these people "control important parts of the federal government, high finance and [missing oxford comma, I hate this book] the mass media." This implies that there are parts of the federal government that they do not control and I really want to sit down with one of these people and ask them what parts of the federal government are not controlled by "Them." How does that work? The department of energy is the lone cabinet department that the Illuminati just can't crack? The Agriculture Department is just like, "no, we work on our own."  

In my academic work, I borrow from political theorist Michael Barkun when I describe conspiracy theories of this scale. He labels these Superconspiracies because they postulate global control over all systems (this if from his book "Culture of Conspiracy" which I recommend). The thing about this level of conspiracy theories is that it has to be an all-or-nothing scenario. The global conspiracy cannot control a majority of the government, it's absurd to think that this would be the case. I refer to the previous paragraph's question, how is the one portion of society resisting? 

Allen claims that this is the time, just as every single conspiracy theorist claims--this is not only the time but also the last chance we will have. Of course, he was wrong, the country survived the Nixon administration without descending into the socialist hellscape that people like Allen feared. Looking back we get to make this claim but at the time of the writing...we still get to make this claim. 

The book was first published in 1971 and Allen's rantings seem out of place even then. The only support he's going to get is from Barry Goldwater's failed political movement. Goldwater is all about this book too, he is going to spend his political career expounding the platform of the John Birch Society who use this book as one of their foundational works. However, Goldwater said a bunch of stuff that Allen would shirk from--such as blanket acceptance of homosexuals. Goldwater would die something closer to a social liberal--which is something Allen would find completely abhorrent. 

Goldwater wanted to shake things up and his claim in 1964, according to Allen anyway, that the two parties resemble each other more than they don't--made sense in the 1960s with regard to certain policies but people who say this generally do not understand politics. 

I have to stay focused though. The real problem is not the state of politics in 1971, it's that Allen thinks you can do something about the situation he thinks we are all in. He thinks we can make an "end run" around the conspirators. We can't take them directly, but they're vulnerable on the flanks like the Romans at Cannae. 

But what does this even mean? There are no flanks here if the conspirators control everything. Where can we make this end run? I'm sure I know where this is going, but we have to take this in steps and Allen's first step is the information war...which I'm sure is where Alex Jones got his idea for the name of the show. 

The recommendation: become the source of information for the people around you. Yeah, this is going to go well. In the 1970s, these people weren't a problem because you could avoid them. If I didn't want my cousin Dan to show up and spout his Nixon-isn't-a-conservative-warmonger-enough conspiracy theories, I just don't tell him what is going on. Now, this is much more difficult. I ban Dan from all my social media, but not everyone in my family does. This is why Q-anon spread so widely, it couldn't be stopped by the users and the social media companies liked the engagement. Allen is recommending that people become insufferable assholes in order to fight the conspiracy. I don't know if this is going to work because every time I have been forced to listen to these people, I start hoping that the conspiracy is true so that some men in black will take the person or me away. 

We need to tell people, for instance, that Nixon invited Red China into the UN instead of fighting the Communists/COMMUNISTS. What Allen doesn't understand is that courting China is fighting the USSR. Conservatives, and especially extremists like Allen, tend to view their enemies as a solid block. A monolithic entity, but the USSR and "Red" China fought a number of engagements that could rightly be called wars (and they may actually be wars but I am not familiar enough with them). 

Allen isn't talking about actually informing people. At least, not with facts. It's all about the emotional value of agreeing that the grip on social control is actually in the hands of other people. Allen claims that this book is a source of facts, but it's not. There are very little facts in the book, and that's not because he's saying incorrect things (which he absolutely is) but because other than a few paragraphs detailing an incorrect thing this book is mostly full of impressions and nebulous claims without substance. The information war he wants to fight, is lacking ammunition.