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 […]
Tucker Carlson’s much-hyped interview with Vladimir Putin was touted by the former Fox news anchor as a serious journalistic endeavour. But it principally offered the Russian President a cosy global platform on Elon Musk's X to promote some of his most-favored conspiracy theories, notably about Ukraine and its western allies. The Russian leader surpassed even […]
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 […]
The Sovereign Citizens movement emerged in the United States in the 1970s as an ideology denying the legitimacy of the federal government. Labeled a domestic terrorist threat by law enforcement agencies, it has enjoyed a resurgence since the COVID-19 global pandemic and has been used as a justification by dozens of rioters at the January […]
"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
On Monday night, 10 men were arrested following a dispute with New York City Police Department officers at the Chabad Lubavitch World Headquarters, in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, a synagogue catering to adherents of the insular Orthodox Jewish movement. The reason: Structural engineers were attempting to fill in a system of mysterious secret tunnels, which had […]
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 […]
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 […]
Midway through last week’s Republican presidential-primary debate, the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy started running through conspiracy theories like a frustrated child mashing buttons on Street Fighter, alleging that the Capitol riot was an “inside job” and that the so-called “Great Replacement” theory “is not some grand right-wing conspiracy theory, but a basic statement of the Democratic […]
