Episode
Phil Tinline - Iron Mountain and the Birth of American Conspiracy Culture
- Podcast
- How To Academy Podcast
- Published
- May 15, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2428
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://pdst.fm/e/traffic.megaphone.fm/NSR1789726475.mp3
Actions
POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/how-to-academy-podcast-460186/episodes/phil-tinline-iron-mountain-and-the-birth-of-american-conspiracy-culture/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/how-to-academy-podcast-460186/phil-tinline-iron-mountain-and-the-birth-of-american-conspiracy-culture.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.
Summary
How did a 1960s spoof of Cold War technocracy become a bible for far-right militias in the present? Political journalist Phil Tinline traces the strange journey of the Report from Iron Mountain. In the mid 1960s, a group of New York satirists conceived of an ingenious hoax; a report purportedly written by government technocrats, planning for an unprecedented economic and political catastrophe: what if world peace broke out? The Report from Iron Mountain became an bestseller, its scathing indictment of the military industrial complex taken seriously even by those who correctly identified the document as a work of satire. Not everyone was so astute. Long after the Report was revealed to be a spoof, conspiracists refused to accept its inauthenticity, and the document mutated into a cornerstone of the far-right ideology that threatens American democracy today. In this episode of the podcast, political journalist Phil Tinline dives into the bizarre and frightening legacy of a satire that might just have been too clever for its own good. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices