The thing is, it's all very well to say "rah rah, let us all fight the conspiracy theories as individuals." But it seems to me that ignores the role of institutions.

Back in the Fifties, the John Birch society had an elaborate and popular conspiracy theory that President Eisenhower was a communist secret agent intent on undermining America. That's not a million miles away from the conspiracy theories about President Obama. But the institutions of the day took a very different approach.

The Democratic Party of the Fifties didn't try to jump on the bandwagon and say "yes it's all true, vote for us to get rid of the secret agent". But senators and congressmen of the modern Republican party like to stoke the modern conspiracy theories by refusing to accept Obama's citizenship.

In the Fifties, William F. Buckley deliberately and publicly purged the Birchers from the National Review, and I believe tried to keep them out of the Young Americans for Freedom. In the present day it's not the radicals that are purged, it's moderates: look how David Frum was expelled from the American Enterprise Institute.

So yes, it would be nice to see "a new culture of fact-based skepticism". But in present day, the problem is that these cultures and individuals are trying to shout down organized institutions that in previous generations would have fought conspiracy theories, and now promote them.

One of the things I liked about DeLillo's Libra is how he had conspiracies in which things would just come together without the parties involved even knowing of each other. Cultural "forces" were sufficient. My pet conspiracy theory of this type is that fear of democracy by those in power combined with marketeers wishing to sell more goods creates a pressure to make the populace more easily lead through an education system in which following the rules becomes more important than the ability to think independently and mass media evolving in a way which eliminates investigative reporting.

Unlikely.

Unlikely that anyone would plan it that way. But people making decisions to protect their own power or to sell products that are no better than their competitors all push in that direction.

Dyslexics of the world, untie!

sorry