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Buchanan first tried to accomplish this by meddling in the landmark Supreme Court case of Dred Scott v. Sandford, which in 1857 set a precedent that all persons of African descent were to be regarded as nonhumans and therefore property. With part A of Operation Worst Goddamn President Ever accomplished, Buchanan moved on to aiding the South in its quest for secession.

That’s right, the president encouraged secession. While Confederate skirmishes raged on unchecked in the state of Kansas, Buchanan claimed that it was well beyond his ability to interfere in matters of secession—despite the fact that he’d just finished doing it to the Mormons in Utah. Due to his stalling, the Confederate army was able to arm itself with the stolen weaponry that made the Civil War possible. Hey, but at least he kept the Mormons from taking over Utah, right?

2. OPERATION SNOW WHITE

Sometime during the 1970s, the Church of Scientology decided its religion wasn’t getting the respect it deserved. Instead of converting to a slightly less silly set of beliefs, it did what any reasonable alien-god-fearing American would: declared a covert war on the U.S. government.

The goal was basically to destroy every single sensitive document that made the religion look bad, in hopes that it would help in their prolonged war to become an officially recognized (as in tax-exempt) religion. The incredible scope of the plot came to light when two men were arrested trying to enter the U.S. Courthouse in Washington with fake IRS credentials. One of the men was sent to jail where he refused to talk, while the other, Michael J. Meisner, gave a fake name and disappeared.

According to Time, a year later Meisner “turned himself in, identified himself . . . and said he had just escaped from two months of ‘house arrest’ by cult members.” He went on to describe how the church had planted employees in the IRS and Justice Department “for the express purpose of stealing documents concerning investigations of Scientology.” He also said they’d broken into the IRS and planted a bug in a conference room, and stolen mind-boggling amounts of sensitive information. After humoring what they must have assumed was just a crazier-than-average Scientologist, the FBI obtained search warrants, just in case, and conducted a raid on Scientology offices that confirmed every word of Meisner’s account.

Scientology’s crack commandos had wiretapped and burglarized various agencies and stolen hundreds of documents, mainly from the IRS. In the end, 136 organizations, agencies, and foreign embassies were infiltrated. According to the Phoenix New Times, Operation Snow White was the largest infiltration of the U.S. government in history. Ever. Of the many thousand hostile governments and criminal organizations that have wanted to get their hands on sensitive U.S. intelligence, the people who actually managed to pull it off also believe that Battlefield Earth is a documentary.

It’s impossible to say if the church was able to use information pilfered from the IRS toward its intended goal. But it’s certainly strange that it didn’t seem to hurt: In 1993 the IRS, the very organization it had freaking wiretapped less than fifteen years before, gave the Church of Scientology exactly what it was after, granting it recognition as an official religion. Toppling the U.S. government may not have been the stated goal, but of all the conspiracies on this list, Scientologists probably walked away from the ordeal with the most reason to believe that, should it ever become necessary, Washington, D.C., was as easy to take down as Grenada.

1. THE BUSINESS PLOT

Notice how not-fascist America is right now? It’s nice, right? Well, just a few decades ago there was a plan to end this whole democracy thing, and some pretty heavy players were involved.

In 1933, a group of wealthy businessmen, which allegedly included the heads of Chase Bank, GM, Goodyear, Standard Oil, and the Du Pont family, and Senator Prescott Bush tried to recruit Marine Corps