1,514 words 
Josh Neal
Intolerant Interpretations
Green Lane, Pennsylvania: Antelope Hill Publications, 2025
It is not a secret that Americans have come to believe in conspiracy theories. The mistrust in the official narrative has grown tremendously since the early 1960s. Why this is the case is examined by Josh Neal in his 2025 book, Intolerant Interpretations.
Concern that hidden malevolent actors were conspiring to do society ill was woven into Anglo-Saxon culture during the Elizabethan Age, when the Protestant English feared a resurgence of Catholic control over England by means of secret plots. One historical conspiracy that drifted into the modern, sensationalist Alex Jones style arose in 1678, during the reign of King Charles II. A former Royal Naval Chaplain named Titus Oates, alarmed the English public by claiming to have uncovered a “Popish Plot” against the King. There was not such a plot, however. It is believed that Oates made the thing up on his own.
The first conspiracy theories that affected domestic American political affairs after independence appeared during the increasingly tense decades leading up the Civil War. There was a conspiracy-fighting Anti-Masonic Party that emerged in the late 1820s which helped elect Millard Filmore as president. Later, the newspaper editor Lewis Charles Levin created the nativist American Party, “the Know-Nothings,” which became influential during the time between the collapse of the Whig Party and the development of the Republican Party. The American Party feared infiltration of the government by the Vatican through Catholic immigrant voters. Many of the early Republican notables during the Civil War were involved in either the Anti-Mason Party or the American Party. Thurlow Weed, President Lincoln’s Secretary of State, was a former Anti-Mason.
Ethno-Metanarratives
Thurlow Weed’s Anti-Masonic political activity was part of what Neal calls an ethno-meta narrative. This is the self-generated mythological narrative of a given ethnic group. It explains the ethnic group’s societal norms and collective direction of travel. Conspiracy theories and suspicious political narratives arise out of the friction between clashing ethno-metanarratives within a common political community. The particulars of a given theory might not be correct in all details, but the suspicion from the clashing ideas does reflect a genuine conflict of interests.
In the case of Anti-Mason Party members Thurlow Weed and Millard Fillmore, both were both old stock American Yankees whose roots stretched back to Puritan New England. They saw themselves in conflict with an establishment which supported slavery and immigration (Fillmore was an immigration patriot and both thought Masons sympathized with the slave-holding South). Their respective beliefs in conspiracies arouse out of the clash between Northern and Southern ethno-metanarratives as well as clashing ethno-metanarratives between native Anglo-Protestants and immigrant Catholics.
This 1888 map perfectly shows clashing ethno-metanarratives. It portrays the North as a more progressive part of the country than the South because Northern society was launched from a Puritan theocratic perspective while the South was built on slavery. There is some truth in the map – Yankee religious activity did create an industrious and prosperous society, but it ignores racial reality. The sub-Saharan slaves didn’t have the human capital to make the South as progressive and wealthy as the North.
After the Civil War, the clash between the sectional ethno-metanarratives subsided, but suspicion based on new clashing ethno-metanarratives arose. Neal writes,
…[T]he decades leading up to the early years of the twentieth century were punctuated by episodes of shocking violence, often emerging due to foreign political intrigue. For instance: the labor and race rots of the 1870s and ‘80s, the transportation of anarchist movements into the United States which culminated in events such as the Haymarket affair, the rise of the Galleanists, and the bombing campaigns (instigated by the activism of Italian anarchist Luigi Galleani), and the assassination of William McKinley at the hands of Leon Czolgosz, inspired by the Russian-Jewish anarchist Emma Goldman, who went to her grave defending the murder. That the disreputable may indeed cynically use the public’s fear of foreign subversion to their own ends does little to obscure the historical fact of genuine political infiltration. (p. 13)
After the end of the Second World War the clash of the ethno-metanarratives continued, albeit from another new angle. This new post-war elite consisted of an ethnically WASP, “one world” internationalist group made up of established elite political actors like Eleanor Roosevelt, Wendell Willkie, and Alger Hiss alongside ethnonationalist, Zionist Jews. This newly merged group was in favor of continuous military deployments abroad and those of this ideological stripe supported “civil rights.” A significant amount of them were either sympathetic to the Soviet Union or snobbish anti-anti-communists.
Neal writes,
Through the writings of two Jewish thinkers ([Karl] Popper, an ethnic Jew from Austria-Hungary, and [Richard] Hofstadter, an American Jew born to a German-Lutheran mother and a Polish-Jewish father), we get an insight into the emergent post-war consensus which would carry the United States to its subsequent phase as an imperialistic and world-hegemonic force. The ethnic grafting of inbound Jewish migrants into the Anglo-Saxon upper class fortified the American state. However, it also relegated many ethnic American Whites to the status of second-class citizens. The integration of Jewish intelligentsia into the upper stratum of Anglo-Saxon America occurred during a time of great domestic strife, and the new Jewish elite shared an architectural role in responding to it. (p. 20)
As the problems with the domestic strife caused by “civil rights” grew, the lower class Anglo-Americans and assimilated German and Irish Catholics – whom Wilmot Robertson would call the American Majority – became suspicious of what was going on while at the same time the US Government, which was swarming with ethnonationalist Jews, really did acquire the ability to carry out conspiracies on a grand scale.
Out of this came the anti-communist ethno-metanarrative explanations of events from groups like the John Birch Society, and individual anti-communist activists from the heartland such as John Stormer and Revilo P. Oliver Jr. The activism of the displaced anti-communist Anglo-Europeans were subjected to scathing critiques by Hofstadter through his mainstream media amplified book The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964). Neal shows that this book wasn’t a work which stands for all time but instead is a Jewish ethnonationalist attack on the political expression of Anglo-European Americans which was starting to form in the conservative movement. By calling these activists “paranoid” Hofstadter could diminish his rivals with a single word, although they weren’t really “paranoid.”
Karl Popper also fought against the accusation that society was shaped by conspiratorial, elite actors, although he didn’t use terms like “the paranoid style.” His most lasting work is The Open Society and its Enemies (1945). In this book, Popper decries “closed societies” such as National Socialist Germany as well as the tyranny of the Soviet Union. This idea, that true American patriots must resist both “Nazis” and “Communists,” was and is deeply held by the American political establishment. However, Neal shows that National Socialist Germany was only a “closed society” due to the extraordinary circumstances of the time, the most important circumstance being the fact that Germany was very close to the revolutionaries in the Soviet Union who were starving Ukrainians and Kazakhs, waging war against Poland, and otherwise being a danger.
Popper’s ideas about an “Open Society” suspiciously rigs American society in such a way that the status of foreign Jewish communities is always paramount. Additionally, the idea of an Open Society is central to the Jewish financier George Soros’s efforts to undermine white America. His organization, The Open Society Foundations, pushes internationalist ideology and the very name demonstrates Popper’s lingering influence. Soros’s society was behind the wave of disorder in 2020, and Soros funded prosecutors deliberately let criminals, mostly sub-Saharans, free to make trouble.
Neal’s takedown of the ideas of Karl Popper makes up a considerable portion of the book. It is tragic that an intellectual refutation of Popper’s so-called “Open Society” ideas found in this book took so long to develop. America is now beset with non-white populations, continually mired in conflicts abroad, and deep in debt. Had the ideas of the “Open Society” been exposed to critique earlier, it could have all been avoided.
The last portion of the book looks at the concept of ethnoscience, especially the study of Paul Bloom’s “racist babies,” documented in Bloom’s 2013 book, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil. This book shows that babies of one particular race react more positively to images of people who are of their race. This is a morally neutral finding, and it matches what one can expect given the theory of evolution, where it is adaptive to stay within one’s own kind. However, Bloom’s interpretation of this is to berate non-Jewish whites for their supposed “racism.” Meanwhile Bloom’s work discounts Jewish violence against Palestinians. Bloom’s interpretation in Just Babies is a manipulative work that seeks to suppress a healthy practice of trusting one’s instincts.
This review only scratches the surface of this incredibly interesting book. It is also the first serious academic work which points out the positives of the John Birch Society, which organized anti-communist old stock Americans into a cohesive force which could articulate the problems arising from the internationalist (Anglo-Jewish) American establishment.
16 comments
And while Hofstadter and Popper were priming the American public against the “wrong” kind of conspiracy theories, the people in the New Left and Counter Culture milieu were concocting a gigantic stack of conspiratorial mythology inbetween acid parties, campus activism and lending a sympathetic ear to literal Communists.
Almost as if to say: Your conspiracy theories are the product of a sick, bigoted mind, while our conspiracy theories are the height of idealism and truth-seeing clarity!
We must also take into consideration that there are ethnic differences in the incidence of schizophrenia and generally in the willingness to trust strangers and out-group members. There’s a reason low-trust groups prefer to marry their own cousins, thinking – not without reason when living amidst other low-trust people – that everyone else is out to get them.
I really don’t think the comparatively high-minded, individualist and naive Anglo-Americans of old had it in them to come up with real nasty accusations against out-groups.
Jacob Burckhardt noted that in Renaissance Italy, every famous man’s demise would lead to dark rumours of poisoning, no matter how old and decrepit he had been.
If there’s already a notable difference in this regard among Whites, how much larger would the difference in the affinity for conspiratizing be when comparing Whites on one end of the White spectrum with a clearly Middle-Eastern group?
Addenda:
If „they’re out to get us“ is part and parcel of your ethnic folklore, your whole group will consist of potential conspiracy theorists.
Ethnic differences in readiness to distrust out-group members and willingness to accuse without proof. Some people are eager to believe the worst about the out-group regardless of context, and the more numerous these people are (and the more enablers there are among their peers), the easier malicious conspiratorial rumours will spread.
Unfortunately, the types you’re describing are thoroughly traumatized by their own atrocity propaganda. Reassessing it is taboo. All this will make it difficult to come to any normal terms with them.
Great! I will get the book, now if I could only talk you into doing an article on the over 900 fraggings in Vietnam. 🙃
Social domination by the sort of people that produced the Lavon Affair points to an increase in conspiracy theories which will be true.
When those who dominate society and set its course and its rules are deceptive and conspiratorial those who don’t believe in deceptions and conspiracies are fools.
None of that has been proven.
That many conspiracy theories are true does not imply that all conspiracy theories are true. We should remain skeptical of the vast conspiracy theory of White supremacy, according to which America is run by a secret power structure of Whites who arrange everything to the racial benefit of White people and keep non-Whites such as Jews and Blacks in an exploited and humiliated state of second-class citizenship.
Yes! Just such a a scenario is depicted in American Buffalo (1996) in which jews and blacks are depicted as living in “open-air prisons,” patrolled by police cars. The inhabitants are exploited by ruthless Anglo-Saxons who swoop in and appropriate anything of valuable, such as a buffalo nickel, the McGuffin of the movie. The movie would be accurate if whites were depicted as the victims. 🦬
Sounds like a good book. I’d be interested in what he says about the present. I think there’s been a collapse into more and more extreme beliefs relatively recently and an amplification of the extreme and fantastic.
Sandy Hook, Pizza Gata, QAnon, covid/vax appear part of this trajectory into madness, shifting the acceptable belief threshold a long way.
This is not serving us. Conspiracy material did prepare the ground for us once, but now I think it’s quite possible it acts as a barrier to entry and draws people away. It certainly damages discourse and pushes us to the back when we should be at the front. A lot of grifters use it as a safe space for themselves too and to suck money out of gullible conservatives.
It’s become amplified as the path of least resistance. It’s much easier and more fun for many people to speculate about wild exotic scenarios and fantastic claims, than deal with race, and the world that’s being taken away from us.
And it makes me suspicious that’s the intention, or at least there could be forces who have the intention within this. (I guess that’s my conspiracy theory.)
The current conspiracy landscape misdirects the more susceptible people down these super intense, religious, wrong paths. And those paths are always away from rational political discourse, away from actionable work, away from facts, away from sifting and sorting reality into actionable frames, towards speculation and fantasist nonsense and puerile entertainment and a kind of religious fervor.
Everything is led back to nonsense and chaos and these religious convictions about something.
To those absorbing this stuff, if someone appears who tells them something that suits them, and/or it’s mysterious or exciting, “it’s true”.
That’s their system for figuring stuff out.
They never spot the errors in what they have absorbed. They are not even looking for them. And they can’t even see them anyway. The have no interest at all in contrary information. It doesn’t exist.
There’s always been some of this around, but it’s got a lot more normalized at least from what I sense.
Substack is a huge informational problem. It rewards this content. Unz is also a major disseminator of this stuff.
There’s still plenty of libtards out there who have the pathological opposite position. That everything is great. Diversity is a triumph of reason, immigration is something to be applauded, racism is everywhere and needs to be rooted out. And that these things are given truths. That we are entering this new fascism under this orange Hitler.
And we shouldn’t underestimate the left’s feelings about Trump and Musk. They are in meltdown currently about it.
“They never spot the errors in what they have absorbed. They are not even looking for them. And they can’t even see them anyway. The have no interest at all in contrary information. It doesn’t exist.”
I can confirm this on dozens of concrete cases. There is absolutely no awareness that their own “alternative” sources may be wrong, methodologically unsound or systematically biased.
They view popularizers of conspiracy ideas – like Alex Jones – as heroes. Not mere researchers or communicators (who could be right or wrong), but brave souls who are constantly risking their life to uncover The Truth and wake humanity up! Every morsel of apparent insider information about the Bad Goods (whoever that may be in a particular context) is valued and perceived as the tip of an iceberg of dark machinations not yet uncovered. They yearn to find the key to the mysteries (the bottom of the rabbit hole) and, consequently, treat conspiracy speculation (that fits their biases) as prophesy/revelation, rather than judging it like you would any other piece of information.
It’s true. I’ve also noticed the more fantastic the claim, the ‘truer’ it is to them and the more intense they are about it. They are chasing the dragon all the time with these theories and claims and not wanting the high to end.
It’s a definite winner. I’m about sixty percent through and enjoyed the chapter on critiquing without scorning Jonathan Haidt’s most known work, the ‘left-liberal’ versus ‘right-liberal’ split, and particularly how the israeli kahneman and tversky promulgate a mechanistic-rational worldview that reads like SABRmetrics sports analyst statnerds arrogantly shunning the intuitive power of folk ethno-narrative supported by the German scientist Gerd Gigerenzer.
There used to be some sort of wild, wacky, tinfoil hat conspiracy theory that there was some sort of “gay agenda.”
The political slogan “conspiracy theory” was used to marginalize anyone “paranoid” and “homophobic” enough to complain about a “gay agenda.”
Then the gay agenda was carried out, complete with “gay marriage,” the “trans” movement, and the open corruption of children.
That’s how the political phrase “conspiracy theory” works as a weapon. It suppresses resistance to real conspiracies.
When you get on board with validating the label “conspiracy theory” you may think you are proving that you are some of “the good ones,” and after you help to marginalize others then you will be tolerated.
If that is what you expect then you will get the opposite of what you expected. You are helping the machinery of suppression, and it will be stronger, and it will crush you too.
The reality is that there are conspiracies beyond count and only a few are ever exposed to the light of day. Theories of conspiracy are potentially unlimited in number and only a select few are garlanded with the monicker of “truth” by being broadcast often & loudly enough by sober & familiar faces to explain things the way they should be explained.
I am a firm believer in the Protocols of The Learned Elders of Zion and I am always perturbed by those in our ranks that denounce them as fake, even though they are coming true. It is as if they are virtue signaling to the jews! 🐍
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