Republic of Lies

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

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

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

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 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. E

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

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.

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