Robert Kennedy Jr.’s views are on the rise as the reputation of public health officials, long seen as earnest if rather dull civil servants, goes into free fall. Even meteorologists, those benign experts who suggest you carry a raincoat on that weekend outing, recently received death threats for “steering” hurricanes to damage their political enemies.
But before we forecast the imminent demise of reason and common sense, consider that it is always conspiracy season in America. The United States was, after all, founded on the curious belief that King George III and his wicked minions intended to enslave Americans. “You were mine to subdue,” croons the creepy crowned head in the musical Hamilton.
The trouble famously began in 1765, when Britain sought to tackle its budget deficit following the expensive French and Indian War that defended British America from its enemies. Placing a small tax on paper, stamps, and other products imported to the colonies seemed a simple way to get Americans to shoulder their share of the burden. Many colonists, however, viewed the Stamp Act as an attempt by shadowy forces to impose outright tyranny. South Carolina’s Henry Laurens railed against “a malicious villain acting behind the curtain” of the British government.
It was a claim that grew in popularity. Five years later, a speaker at a Boston town meeting declared that a “desperate plan of imperial despotism has been laid, and partly executed, for the extinction of all civil liberty.” In 1773, Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchison bemoaned the “artful and designing men” who had convinced a gullible public that the British government intended to enslave North American colonists.
By the eve of the conflict, many Americans believed the empire was run by a secret cabal that intended to put white Americans in bondage. Virginia planter George Washington warned that London powerbrokers intended to make colonists “tame and abject slaves, as the Blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway.” Alexander Hamilton agreed that “a system of slavery” was being “fabricated against America.”
Thomas Jefferson likewise criticized the “deliberate and systematical plan of reducing us to slavery.” His famous declaration insists that Great Britain, after committing “repeated injuries and usurpations,” intended to assert “an absolute tyranny” over the thirteen colonies. The nation’s founding document is nothing if not an attempt to convince the world of a dubious conspiracy theory. It was a theory that, as historian Bernard Bailyn writes, “lay at the heart of the Revolutionary movement.”