Unlike the Elders of Zion or the grays of Zeta Reticuli (of alien-invasion fame), an actual group that called itself the Illuminati was founded, in Bavaria, on May 1, 1776. They were not dedicated to global domination so much as to the discussion of what were at the time dangerously radical ideas, such as secularism and women’s rights. The founder of the movement was a law professor at the University of Ingolstadt named Adam Weishaupt, but other members are hard to identify because they veiled themselves with pseudonyms. Carl Theodore, the Duke of Bavaria, banned the group in the summer of 1784, and three years later the society was no more. That should have been the end of it.
But, in the midst of the yellow-fever epidemic of 1798, as Brown scribbled maniacally about hidden voices, secret societies, and psychotic murderers, fears of the Illuminati exploded through what was the Internet of its time: the untamed print culture of late-eighteenth-century America. Books about the cabal included John Robison’s “Proofs of a Conspiracy,” from 1798, and William Cobbett’s “Detection of a Conspiracy,” from 1798. In a public sermon on Independence Day, 1799, the Hartford attorney William Brown described the Illuminati’s members as a conflation of global élites and “furious Africans,” brimming with “demoniac lust and barbarity.” The president of Yale, Timothy Dwight, underscored the darkest fears of all when he asked his Connecticut congregation, “Shall . . . our daughters [become] the concubines of the Illuminati?”
When medical systems fail, so do logic and reason, clearing a path for contagions of fear and blame. The Illuminati panic, exploding in a country battered by a covert enemy, which experts could neither explain nor contain, brought to the fore a theme that historians would later call the “paranoid style” of American politics. It endures, from Pizzagate to the Deep State to Fake News, and presently flourishes amid the chaos brought on by COVID-19. In March, Facebook rated as false more than forty million posts about the pandemic, a revelation that was followed by accusations by the New York Post’s editorial board that the Facebook fact checkers were themselves “fake news.” A theory that the virus emerged from a secret laboratory outside Wuhan, China, has moved from being a fringe conspiracy into a matter to be investigated by the U.S. Senate. The coronavirus vaccine, although it doesn’t exist, must also be a plot, because Bill Gates is surely out to destroy humanity and plant a chip in the brains of whoever’s left. One in ten Americans now believes that the United States government created the virus. “COVID-19,” the signs of recent protesters in Huntington Beach say, “is a lie”; in St. Paul and Boston, it’s a “hoax”; elsewhere in Minnesota, it’s a “fake crisis.”