Conspiracy theories about vaccines. Secret meetings with dictators. An enemies list. President Donald Trump’ s most controversial Cabinet nominees — Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard and Kash Patel — flooded the zone Thursday in back-to-back-to-back confirmation hearings that were like nothing the Senate has seen in modern memory. The onslaught of claims, promises and testy exchanges did not occur in a political vacuum. The […]
Around half of adults across the world hold antisemitic beliefs and deny the historic facts of the Holocaust, according to the latest edition of the largest global study of anti-Jewish attitudes by the Anti-Defamation League, a New York-based advocacy group. The study surveyed more than 58,000 adults from 103 countries and territories representing 94% of […]
Frosty pine trees rim the edge of an icy lake. Snow is falling; spa music plays in the background. A gray-haired man with a pleasant face stands beside the lake. He begins to undress. He is going swimming, he explains, to demonstrate his faith, and his opposition to science, to technology, to modernity. “I don’t […]
Elon Musk has a new friend in British politics, in the form of Tommy Robinson, the far right grifter currently in jail for persistently spreading false information in violation of a court order. In the early hours of January 2, Musk tweeted “Free Tommy Robinson!” The world’s richest man went on to promote a video […]
Extraordinary events are almost always catalysts for conspiracy theories – often providing more “acceptable” explanations for something that wasn’t “supposed to happen.” And what could be more unexpected than the sudden and stunning collapse of the Assad regime in Syria? Rebel forces undid well over 40 years of rule in an offensive that took less […]
Democrats will spend the next four years debating why the party suffered a sweeping defeat last week. Maybe it was inflation, or the culture wars, or Joe Biden’s hubris, or podcasts, that drove voters in every swing state to the Republican presidential nominee. At least one theory, however, can already be put to rest: Elon […]
In the minutes and hours after a 20-year-old repeatedly shot at former president Donald Trump during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, social media platforms, message boards, and encrypted chat groups lit up with conspiracies about the shooting. From wild claims that the incident was a “deep state plot” devised by President Joe Biden […]
For 14 hours over the weekend, Sydney university student Ben Cohen was one of the most reviled men on the internet after he was falsely accused of being the knifeman who went on a stabbing rampage in a Sydney shopping centre, killing six people. The ABC has pieced together how anti-semitic and pro-Kremlin accounts turned […]
Jackson Hinkle has cultivated an online persona so incendiary that he has been kicked off YouTube, Twitch and Instagram. He rages on undaunted, even energized. He produces a regular podcast on Rumble, a website popular with many prominent conservatives. He writes dozens of posts a day on X, where his following has surged to 2.5 […]