Simon in London comments:
I can understand why the average Norwegian doesn't give much credence to conspiracy theories; chances are his leaders aren't being particularly conspiratorial (even if they have decided to replace him with a bunch of third world immigrants, they don't make a secret of it). But Americans seem particularly unfortunate in that they have almost Norwegian levels of trust combined with a fairly high degree of conspiratorial behaviour by their ruling class, and a media incredibly* deferential to that ruling class, so they are more easily taken advantage of than most.
*From the outside the deference of the US media is very striking. France, Germany, Britain etc all have much less deferential media ... . Whereas the free US media consistently shills for the Powers-that-Be.
It's interesting to speculate upon the carrot-and-stick balance in the U.S. Occasionally, bad things, such as sex scandals, happen to inconvenient people. Perhaps something like that explains the hilariously weak 60 Minutes story recently on the NSA.
But it's really not a very scary place. For example, when the investigative journalist Michael Hastings died in Hollywood last year in a flaming one-car crash, I thought I owed it to him to actually leave the house and visit the site of his death. But the more I looked into it, the less suspicious it seemed: he was driving recklessly. Now, Uncouth Reflections has an interview with Hastings' brother that confirms that the poor man was going through another manic phase.
So that mostly leaves the carrot. And there are a lot of carrots in a big, rich country like ours.