ABSTRACT
The developments traced in the previous chapters continued throughout the 1970s and beyond. Media accounts of Watergate thus also employ a very narrow notion of conspiracy, referring to the event as a “criminal conspiracy” and to Nixon as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the legal sense of the term, and brand the Watergate conspirators as paranoid conspiracy theorists. At the same time, a veritable counter-discourse on conspiracy theory emerged. Viewing the public’s rejection of conspiracy theorizing as proof of a large-scale conspiracy became constitutive for the conspiracy theorists’ collective and individual identity. The form of conspiracy theory also changed: event and superconspiracy theories merged to form superconspiracy theories, targeting multiple acts and actors in American history and politics. The dominant conspiracy theories of the 1970s thus served as templates that remain the dominant form of conspiracy theorizing until today, while the “knowledge networks” that developed by way of alternative production infrastructures and communication channels were predecessors of the online and offline conspiracist subcultures of the 21st century. The chapter ends with a brief outlook on the status of conspiracy theory in the 1980s, but points out that much of what has been argued in the chapter still holds true today.
