“Make America paranoid again”: reconquista do conspiracionismo e decadência das instituições do conhecimento nos Estados Unidos (1989 – 2016)

Abstract

This work examines the relations between the state, think tanks and universities in the United States between 1989 and 2016, highlighting how post-Cold War and War on Terror policies systematized and institutionalized the denial of knowledge and the dissemination of false information as state policy. The work investigates how state and knowledge agents (including academics, scientists and journalists) contributed to the popularization and production of conspiracy theories, deconstructing the American Knowledge Order in the transition from the 20th to the 21st centuries. This deconstruction, however, began with the rise of right-wing communication networks, through think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute, Hoover Institution, John Birch Society and the Heritage Foundation, which promoted themselves politically by capitalizing on conspiracy theories and political paranoia, delegitimizing academic knowledge. Thus, through the analysis of the publications of these organizations and their insertion in politics and academia, the research observes the gradual construction of the Knowledge Order in the United States, highlighting the relationship between think tanks, universities and the State in this process. It then traces the networks established between academics, politicians and businesspeople to analyze how they encouraged conspiratorial thinking to promote their agendas. In this way, the research seeks to demonstrate how the conservative/conspiratorial movement of the 21st century, which reached the White House in 2016 with the election of Donald Trump, is inserted in a tradition of American conspiracy