Reading pop culture as encoded conspirator messages preserves believers’ chosenness

Evidence

We can gain some sense of this ambivalence from a practice mentioned earlier: that of treating some fi lms and novels as encoded messages created by the conspirators. That claim has apparently not yet been made about either Conspiracy Theory or The X-Files, but it has been made about numerous science-fi ction fi lms. The belief in hidden messages has two advantages. First, it locates a level of meaning in popular culture that the mass audience is unaware of but that the knowing few can read. Second, it maintains a consistent view of the world as controlled by powerful, hidden forces, since if the forces are as powerful as the conspiracists assert, then they would surely be able to control the content of movies and books. — Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy, 226

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Conspiracists read mainstream films as secretly encoded Illuminati messages — Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic…, 201