Does the government purposely feed conspiracy theories?”
Setting aside every book I’ve read: my job has involved working on prolonged projects for half-a-dozen Western-style governments (and of course being privy to their interactions with other governments) and I could put hand on heart and say that only one of them could be described – at senior level – as ‘straight.’ The others were more or less concerned with rewarding cronies, putting crazy theories into practice, and a spot of ‘divide and rule.’ Here’s one very small example. The Governor of a particular State (in a federal system) took away almost all of the funding from schools in those areas where the parents hadn’t voted for him. And when he went a’visiting just before the next election, he found himself in one of those schools, and some of the children asked him why they didn’t have the kind of equipment etc., that other schools did; and he said outright ‘Your parents didn’t vote for me, so your school isn’t getting any funding.’ I could get very, very depressed.
