In Donald Trump’s administration, writes Hari Kunzru in the Review’s May 29 issue, “conspiracy—which usually presents the government as a distant object of obsession or fantasy—has become governmental logic.” This can be seen not only in the elevation of the noted vaccine skeptic and natural supplement advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to a cabinet position overseeing health and human services, but in the metastasization of an ideology Kunzru calls the “New Weird Fusionism”: a marriage of “the conspiracy cultures of the Christian right and the countercultural left.”

While its power as an electoral bloc is recent, Kunzru argues, New Weird Fusionism draws on a long history of American occultism, “purity-obsessed physical culture,” New Agers, and flimflam artists who market cures and philosophies about how the individual can manifest change in the world through positive thinking. After all, Kunzru writes, “In the markets at least, the mind-cure movement can do what it claims, drawing reality toward itself.”

Below, alongside Kunzru’s essay, are five articles from our archives about occultists, spiritualists, and the paranoid style in American politics.

Hari Kunzru
Doing Their Own Research

An electoral coalition of the conspiracy cultures of both the Christian right and the countercultural left helped bring Donald Trump back to power, and now pseudoscience and paranoia are in the ascendant.

Caroline Fraser
Mrs. Eddy Builds Her Empire

“Virtually every twentieth-century book or sect that promotes healing through the power of mind is in some ways a repackaging of the work of one woman, Mary Baker Eddy, the self-proclaimed ‘Discoverer and Founder’ of Christian Science and the author of Science and Health.”

—July 11, 1996

Edmund S. Morgan
Pioneers of Paranoia

When Republicans founded “Democratic Societies,” to protect civil liberties, Federalists saw them as the work of Jacobins sent to bring the reign of terror to America. Indeed the whole world was to be brought to its knees by a secret society known as the Bavarian Illuminati, dedicated to atheism and anarchy, an organization that existed only in the minds of fanatical Federalists.

—October 6, 1994

The Future of Progressive Politics with Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal

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Frances A. Yates
The Fear of the Occult

“There was always a strong undercurrent of fear in the occultists, fear of the forces they might be invoking, anxiety to keep on the safe side in dealing with them.”

—November 22, 1979

Martin Gardner
Greetings from Far Away

“Suddenly, in 1967, Spiritualism began a comeback. It was, of course, part of the big Occult Explosion, but the strongest shove came from three men: the late Bishop James Pike, the later Reverend Arthur Ford, and Allen Spraggett, a Canadian fundamentalist preacher turned occult journalist.”

—May 3, 1973

Elizabeth Hardwick
The Oswald Family

There is every evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald was incapable of systematic, careful reading, about Communism or anything else. When he applied for admission to the Albert Schweitzer School in Switzerland he gave as his favorite authors, Jack London, Charles Darwin, and Norman Vincent Peale. The incongruity of the list points to his ignorance of all three. Yet it is pretension, the projection of his ambitions and hopes in ideological terms that stay in one’s mind as a puzzle. He seems a good deal like those lumpen intellectuals of the early Thirties in Germany and Austria, empty, ignorant, rootless men, without any gifts or skills but still with a certain conceit that made them want to make from the negative of their personalities some sort of programmatic certainty.

—November 5, 1964

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