Yes, of course it does.
Does THIS sound like something 'they' would write?
Does THIS sound like something 'they' would write?
Quote:7) Why do people still believe in the Illuminati today?
The Illuminati never completely disappeared from popular culture — it was always burbling in the background. But in the mid-1970s, the Illuminati made a marked comeback thanks to a literary trilogy that gave the group the simultaneously spooky and laughable image it holds today.
The Illuminatus Trilogy, by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, depicted the Illuminati with ironic detachment. This trilogy became a countercultural touchstone, and its intermingling of real research — Weishaupt, the founder of the real Illuminati, is a character — with fantasy helped put the Illuminati back on the radar.
"It was a great example of the post-'60s ways of ironizing elite forms of power," Mark Fenster says. "That ironic vision of conspiracy theory is extremely widely distributed. You can be both a serious conspiracy theorist and joke about it."
From there, the Illuminati became a periodic staple of both popular culture — as in Dan Brown's massively popular novel Angels and Demons — and various subcultures, where the group is often intermingled with Satanism, alien myths, and other ideas that would have been totally foreign to the real Bavarian Illuminati.
Uscinski clarifies that most Americans today don't actually believe in the Illuminati. In a survey of conspiracy theories he conducted in 2012, he says zero people claimed that groups like Freemasons or Illuminati were controlling politics. Even so, the Illuminati seem to persist in our collective consciousness, serving as the butt of jokes and the source of lizard people rumors (explained here).
