Stuff They Don't Want You to Know
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- ¥1,700
Publisher Description
“Interesting...Bowlin's calmly rational approach to the subject of conspiracy theories shows the importance of logic and evidence.”—Booklist
"A page-turning book to give to someone who believes in pizza pedophilia or that the Illuminati rule the world."—Kirkus Reviews
The co-hosts of the hit podcast Stuff They Don’t Want You to Know, Ben Bowlin, Matthew Frederick, & Noel Brown, discern conspiracy fact from fiction in this sharp, humorous, compulsively readable, and gorgeously illustrated book.
In times of chaos and uncertainty, when trust is low and economic disparity is high, when political institutions are crumbling and cultural animosities are building, conspiracy theories find fertile ground. Many are wild, most are untrue, a few are hard to ignore, but all of them share one vital trait: there’s a seed of truth at their center. That seed carries the sordid, conspiracy-riddled history of our institutions and corporations woven into its DNA.
Ben Bowlin, Matt Frederick, and Noel Brown host the popular iHeart Media podcast, Stuff They Don’t Want You To Know. They are experts at exploring, explaining, and interrogating today’s emergent conspiracies—from chem trails and biological testing to the secrets of lobbying and the indisputable evidence of UFOs.
Written in a smart, witty, and conversational style, elevated with amazing illustrations, Stuff They Don’t Want You to Know is a vital book in understanding the nature of conspiracy and using truth as a powerful weapon against ignorance, misinformation, and lies.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bowlin, Frederick, and Brown expand on their podcast of the same name in this eye-opening and entertaining look at the roots of American conspiracy theories. Throughout, the authors alternate between exposing U.S. government actions that provide the seeds for conspiracy theories and debunking those theories. Ranging from biological warfare to CIA-engineered coups and assassinations and UFO sightings, the authors showcase an alarming lack of transparency and deliberate misrepresentations by government agencies. For example, they trace the roots of the popular chemtrail conspiracy theory, which posits that airplane vapor trails are evidence of the government dispersing chemicals for "nefarious purposes," to a 1990s military paper on manipulating the weather "as a way to alter or control a battlespace" and 1950s tests in which the Army Chemical Corps sprayed the chemical compound ZnCdS over "enormous swaths" of the country to simulate a biological or chemical weapons attack. Elsewhere, the authors link the infamous Tuskegee experiment, in which poor Black sharecroppers were unwittingly enrolled in a government syphilis study yet received no treatment for the disease, to Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy among African Americans. Though many of the examples—including LBJ's disseminations during the Gulf of Tonkin incident—are well-known, the authors amass a wealth of detail and lucidly separate fact from fiction. This is a valuable resource for understanding how conspiracy thinking gained its current grip on American politics and culture.
