The worst corner of this flourishing conspiracy culture amounts to a deeply regressive view of the world. It denounces immigrants as the advance army of some hidden globalist agenda. It calls Black Lives Matter activists liars and Soros-paid actors, while the victims of mass shootings and their grieving families are condemned as fakes. It

Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson, who suggested that President Barack Obama would declare martial law and cancel the 2016 elections to remain in power. There was also National Security Advisor Michael Flynn (who was quickly fired), notorious for retweeting stories linking Hillary Clinton to child sex trafficking.

The news is full of white supremacist groups and their suspicions of a shadowy Zionist world government. The concept of a Deep State—a shadow regime, a secret body that’s really in charge—has become so pervasive that members of Congress are talking about it on national television, and its prominence hasn’t even begun to reach full force just yet.

in Trump’s speeches. Jones began darkly predicting that the elections would be “rigged” in Clinton’s favor, a claim that Trump quickly made a central tenet of the latter days of his campaign.

Soon after, the United States narrowly elected a conspiracy enthusiast as its president, a man who wrongly believes that vaccines cause autism, that global warming is a hoax perpetuated by the Chinese “in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive,” as he tweeted in 2012, and who claimed, for attention and political gain, that Barack Obama

“The president of the United States has Alex Jones on speed dial! Alex Jones! I mean…” He trails off.

a twist reminiscent of Nixon conspiring against the imaginary enemies he feared—taken to generating what they themselves have scornfully termed “fake news.” The Trump administration launched its own weekly news service on social media in 2017, dedicated entirely to positive coverage of the president. The same year, the Associated Press discovered

A lot of conspiratorial hysterias in the early days of this country focused on what the historian Kathryn Olmsted in her book Real Enemies calls “alien subversion”: a fear that disaffected outside groups—Jews, Catholics, Freemasons, Mormons—were plotting to seize control for themselves. Sometimes, more rarely, the alien enemy was closer to home, as

As his examples, Hofstadter pointed to McCarthyism, anti-Masonic fervor, and fear of the Illuminati, which had been haunting the colonies since the 1700s.