In the hours and days after the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, there appeared to be a broad, bipartisan consensus that what had just occurred was a flagrant assault on democracy and the peaceful transition of power. Republicans who had been loyal to then-president Donald Trump acknowledged he was responsible for […]
The left-wing journalist, documentary-maker and crusading commentator John Pilger has died at the age of 84, eliciting a wave of mostly flattering obituaries. Among the many eulogies and effusive praise for his campaigning reporting style, fewer tributes have critiqued Pilger’s reflexive anti-American worldview and embrace of conspiracy theories – a visceral embrace that escalated over his lifetime. Nor has Pilger’s posthumous reputation been much diminished by his repeated denials or contextualization of the atrocities of dictators, mass murderers and terrorists, from Mao and Pol Pot to Slobodan Milosevic, Bashar al-Assad, Osama bin Laden, Vladimir Putin and more. As a young reporter in the early 1960s, Pilger moved from his […]
In nearly three years since a mob of Donald Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in an effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election, far-right figures have made a claim that flies in the face of reality: That the Jan. 6 attack was actually driven by far-left antifa activists dressed up like Trump supporters, or by […]
Midway through last week’s Republican presidential-primary debate, the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy started running through conspiracy theories like a frustrated child mashing buttons on Street Fighter, alleging that the Capitol riot was an “inside job” and that the so-called “Great Replacement” theory “is not some grand right-wing conspiracy theory, but a basic statement of the Democratic […]
In the murky reaches of the conspiracy universe, a resounding silence prevails following the recent guilty pleas and sentencing of Sidney Powell, Kenneth Chesebro and Scott Hall. The felony crime of the Trump-aligned trio? Brazenly attempting to conspire in manipulating the results of the 2020 US presidential election. Yet, in the conspiracy theorists' echo chambers, […]
The man who became a figurehead of the January 6 Capitol riot is planning to run for Congress in Arizona, and he may not even be the most extreme candidate on the ballot. Jacob Chansley, a January 6 rioter known as the QAnon Shaman who wore face paint and horns to breach the Capitol, pleaded […]
Tenou'a: Let’s first define the terms: what is conspiracism – what in French we call conspirationnisme or complotisme? Rudy Reichstadt: These two words entered the dictionary in French in 2011 and 2016 respectively. In reality, conspirationnisme has been in use since the 1980s. The term théorie du complot is older; it was first used in […]
