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.

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. E

Beginning in the 1970s and continuing through the 1990s, investigative journalism, along with declassified FBI and CIA files, revealed a series of appalling secret government programs. To pick just one: in MKUltra, the CIA and the army explored the use of mescaline and LSD by dosing unwitting civilians, including mental patients, prisoners, and joh

In 1954, the CIA directly assisted in overthrowing Guatemala’s president, Colonel Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, in large part to protect the interests of the American-owned United Fruit Company. In 1973, the agency did the same in Chile, to destabilize and drive out of power Salvador Allende, the country’s democratically elected Socialist leader.

Pizzagate, the conspiracy theory alleging that Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair is affiliated with a secret pedophile ring run out of a D.C. pizza parlor, is still burning up Twitter threads and message boards and leaking repeatedly into the mainstream press, where it’s disbelieved but still covered. The environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr

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

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 wa

“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 t