#2983: Steve Harris

The 2020 book America’s Secret History: How the Deep State, The Fed, The JFK, MLK, and RFK Assassinations, And Much More Led to Donald Trump's Presidency, which purports to contain “the truth behind the stories they don’t want you to know”, might perhaps be judged to be the epitome of 20^th- and early 21^st-century conspiracy thinking, and a potentially canonical text for QAnon-adjacent activists (were it not for such groups’ proclivity to suspect anything like this of being establishment psyops). The book promotes pretty much every significant and familiar politically-oriented conspiracy theory you can think of, and purports to offer e.g. conclusive proof that Sirhan B. Sirhan didn’t kill RFK, that James Earl Ray did not kill Martin Luther King, Jr. – the book instead blames (of course) the US Government, the FBI, and the city of Memphis of first conspiring to kill MLK and then cover it up – that the establishments of the Carnegie, Rockefeller and Ford Foundations were the beginning of The Deep State, and that John Hinckley, Jr., who tried to assassinate Reagan in 1991, was an agent of George Bush Sr. Also, of course, 9/11 was an inside job (controlled demolition), and so on. At least the book manages to utilize an impressive number of deranged historical sources, including paranoid anti-communist government reports from the 1950s like the Reece Report, and embellishes them with wild-eyed speculation. The book was, of course, well received by other conspiracy theory authors. We don’t have much other information on the book’s author, Steve Harris (he may or may not have written a number of other books (the name is common enough to make it hard to determine), except that he seems to be something of a veteran on the ‘alternative history’ stage, but judging his level of trustworthiness on the contents of America’s Secret History doesn’t exactly suggest any point to investigating further.

 

Diagnosis: Admittedly more of a ‘classic’ conspiracy theorist than a QAnon- or altright-related one. Still.