The assassination attempt on former president and current candidate Donald Trump sparked conspiracy theories from almost the moment the shots rang out. And in keeping with America’s toxic political polarization, the theories tended to fall across two different narratives, depending on your political persuasion. Claims that the shooting was staged or a hoax circulated among […]
In the minutes and hours after a 20-year-old repeatedly shot at former president Donald Trump during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, social media platforms, message boards, and encrypted chat groups lit up with conspiracies about the shooting. From wild claims that the incident was a “deep state plot” devised by President Joe Biden […]
On Wednesday, the House passed a bill with large bipartisan support that could potentially result in the popular social media app TikTok being banned from use in the United States. Former President Donald Trump, who has previously supported banning TikTok, seemingly reversed his position on the issue after meeting with a Republican donor invested in […]
You’d have to go back to the peak years of Bob Dylan’s cultural relevance, when one critic cum stalker started searching the songwriter’s garbage for clues about his lyrics, to find a musician who attracts as many amateur code breakers as Taylor Swift does. Swift has fed the frenzy by declaring that her songs, her […]
"Is the Deep State activating HAARP to disrupt the Iowa Caucus? We all know @NikkiHaley has a lot of friends in the defense industry and Military industrial complex," Loomer says in a January 11, 2024 post on X, formerly known as Twitter. [...] Read more
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 […]
Conspiracy theories about powerful elites who rule through secrecy have long been a staple of fringe literature and paranoid fantasies. From the Freemasons and the Illuminati of the 18th century to the Rothschilds and other Jewish financiers referred to in works like “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” to today’s supposedly all-powerful “deep state,” […]
During his tenure at Fox News, Jesse Watters has risen from compiling blatantly racist on-the-street ambush interviews for disgraced former Fox host Bill O'Reilly to becoming one of the network’s highest-rated hosts. That rise has been fueled in part by Watters' embrace of the network's favored conspiracy theories, including questioning the integrity of the 2020 […]
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 […]
As pundits and politicos spar over whether Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign will factor into the outcome of the 2024 election, one thing is clear: Kennedy’s political following is built on a movement that seeks to legitimize conspiracy theories. His claims decrying vaccines have roiled scientists and medical experts and stoked anger over whether […]
