In May 2013, thousands of people staged a peaceful gathering to protest the bulldozing of trees in Istanbul’s Gezi Park. When police violently cracked down on the demonstrators, massive protests erupted in Istanbul and other major cities in Turkey. The demonstrations were the first in a series of events that has profoundly shaken Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its leader, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Upset at the cracks in his power, the former prime minister has turned to conspiracy-laden rhetoric to rally his base. He has consistently accused nefarious international lobbies of stirring things up to sabotage the country’s economy and tarred domestic opponents as traitors and threats to the will of the nation.

Complementing Erdoğan’s diatribes is a calmer, more cerebral liberal intelligentsia. Academics and writers sympathetic to the government have misleadingly characterized major events of the past year and a half, including the Gezi Park protests and a major corruption scandal, as coup attempts against the AKP. In doing so, they have exploited the sensitivities of a country that witnessed four actual military putsches between 1960 and 1997.