Jones and Trump were in fact longtime mutual fans. After announcing his run, candidate Trump made one of his first media appearances on Jones’s show, appearing via Skype from Trump Tower. Jones endorsed him early and often and, in turn, many of the radio host’s favorite talking points started turning up

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

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

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

At the same time, Trump brought a raft of conspiracy theorists into his cabinet: among them was

The figure uniting these disparate groups—the white supremacists, the sexists, the die-hard nationalists—is Donald Trump. He legitimized certain conspiracy theories and theorists in a way that would have been unimaginable before the 2016 election, making “rigged elections” and the Deep State broad subjects of discussion. And nobody since Nixon has

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 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.

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