Ryan Switzer is a PhD candidate in sociology at Stockholm University. He researches right-wing politics in welfare states.
The classic show The X-Files celebrated and satirized America’s love of conspiracy theories before they became an all-consuming obsession. When the show returned to the air after a long gap, it had to confront a culture of paranoia that made Fox Mulder’s imagination look tame.
Some people suspect that humanity’s greatest achievements aren’t human achievements at all. Some people suspect that humanity’s greatest achievements aren’t human achievements at all.
The 1998 B-list slasher film Urban Legend unleashes on its protagonists a host of horrors from the American folk canon. Some have their roots in real life.
The Manson Family left a trail of bodies in 1969. No one should have been surprised.
And he sounds like . . . a hippie?
Even the CIA has debunked “Havana syndrome” — the belief that hypersonic weapons are making American diplomats sick — but diehards in the media and Congress won’t let it go.
It’s now impossible to distinguish “conspiracy theories” from the day-to-day hysteria of our era of hyperpolitics.
Lyndon LaRouche started off lecturing about dialectics and Rosa Luxemburg. By the 1980s, he was Glenn Beck with a private security force.
From lab leaks to mask efficacy, the media enforcement of scientific consensus through a policing of which questions are acceptable to ask is itself unscientific.
How hedge fund manager George Soros became enemy number one of the international right.
Crunching the numbers on the class war.
The colonial history of South Africa lives on in conspiracy theories about the “Third Force,” but it’s not secret external enemies plaguing South Africa today — it’s the country’s own ruling class.
The capture of Adolf Eichmann in Argentina fueled antisemitic fears of the Andinia Plan, a supposed Jewish plot to create a homeland in Latin America.
The Caribbean has a reputation for its lenient tax laws, but the United States is the second-biggest tax haven in the world.
Hindu nationalists insist that, thousands of years ago, Indians were already equipped with modern knowledge of science and technology, only to be undermined by centuries of foreign invasion.
What actually happened to Nepal’s royal family on June 2, 2001?
New evidence further implicates Saudi intelligence in the September 11, 2001, attacks — and nobody seems to care.
There remains a fortune to be made at sea — but no longer in Somalia. Modern pirates have turned their attention to the Singapore Strait and the South China Sea.
Between 2013 and 2016, Ebola claimed more than 11,000 lives in West Africa. Beginning in 2018, another two-year wave of the devastating disease caused a further 2,000 deaths in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. These days, even when Ebola itself isn’t spreading, false conspiracy theories about it are.
People have been speculating about the British royal family for centuries. You decide which conjectures might be true.