Senator John McCain finds 9 I n conspiracy theories "a distraction from the proper lessons of ${ \mathfrak { g } } / { \mathfrak { 1 1 } } ,$ from what is truly important to this countrY:'9 McCain reiterates the accepted critique of conspiracy theories: "They ignore the methods of science, the protocols of investigation, and the dictates of logic. The conspiracy theorists chase any bit of information, no matter how flimsy, and use it to fit their preordained conclusions. They ascribe to the government, or to some secretive group, powers wholly out of proportion to what the evidence suggests. And they ignore the facts that are present in plain sight:'10
The stigma attached to the "outsider-y-ness" of the conspiracy theorist enables the very term conspiracy theorist to be wielded so as to exclude a view in advance. For example, the New York Times columnist David Brooks dismissed Kevin Philips1S book American Theocracy as crude conspiracy mongering.11 The book is a critical account of the conservative coalition in American politics, a coalition that Phillips, as a young Republican strategist, helped build. Similarly, Senator James Inhofe sought to discredit attributions of global warming to human factors as "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people:'12 In each case, the critic attempts to render a book or an issue as so outrageous that no sensible person could possibly find it worth any serious attention.
The stigmatizing efect of labeling someone a conspiracy theorist is so great that allegations of conspiracy brought by governmental oficials seem somehow not themselves to be conspiracy theories. Theorizing a conspiracy, then, is not what makes a conspiracy theorist; thinkng or positing something that mainstream common sense (what Lacan calls "�he big Other") deems paranoid nonsense is. Thus, we find ourselves in the weird situation where some conspiracy theories have a presumed legitimacy in part because they cannot be called conspi.i-acy theories. Around the time the Bush administration was asserting that a conspiring group of Islamic fundamentalists armed with box cutters hijacked four planes, brought down the World Trade Center, smashed through the west wall of the Pentagon, and crashed in a field in Pennsylvania, U.S. government oficials and the mainstream media publicized the proliferation of conspiracy theories in the Arab world, conspiracy theories that blamed the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on the Massad or the U.S. government itself. In a speech to the United Nations General Assem. bly on November 10, 2001, George W. Bush declared, "We must speak the truth about terror. Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September the uthj malicious lies that attempt to shift the blame away from the terrorists, themselves, away from the guilty:' 13
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