I keep dipping in and out of John Michael Greer's "The Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies and Hidden History", and it is certainly possible to position the 'truth' movement within the structure of earlier phenomena. Listen to this extract from the section on the emergence of rejected knowledge:
"The downside of this process was a complete breakdown in critical thinking on the part of many believers in rejected knowledge. Increasingly, in the last decades of the twentieth century, the only evidence that was needed to prove the reality of some piece of rejected knowledge to many people was the sheer fact that someone in science or government had rejected it.
Real anomalies and traditional systems of alternative thought and practice were shoved aside in order to make room for new and more colourful theories, many of which rested on foundations of pure fantasy and some of which had been invented from whole cloth to cash in on a lucrative market.
A current of paranoia flowed into the movement as conspiracy theories gained widespread acceptance. The same period also saw alternative circles around the world embrace a "machismo of credulity", an attitude that treated a willingness to believe the most extravagant and unsupported claims as proof of one's intellectual liberation or spiritual insight."
p.492