Was Trump presidency the source of the recent wave of conspiracy theories? Or rather the high frequency of conspiracy theories was, in fact, a symptom of times of change and of deep societal fracture. Former Jezebel journalist, currently Motherboard (VICE) Anne Merlan spent hours talking with and in the company of conspirationists of all colours.
Republic of Lies. American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power is collecting and explaining the major obsessions of untruth, from UFO believers to Birthers and Pizzagate. They are politicians, simple people, opinion breakers and self investigators. There are even conspiracy entrepreneurs. Many of them anti-semitic, Holocaust deniers.
The advantage of having been directly in touch, as a participant to different meetings or through direct discussions with conspirationists´ of all colours, is that a wide range of issues and the complexity of the conspiracy theories as such is offered. The collection of data and the different takes on conspiracies is very useful for a full picture of the conspiracy landscape. It is a very useful selection, updated with the latest state support perpetrated through Trump´s latest presidency which gives a very clear perspective of the phenomenon, although mostly as seen in American - but with reverberations in other part of the world as well, where authoritarian phenomena are a political reality lately.
However, despite the impressive accumulation of information, the critical approach is lacking. There is no stance - definitely, a journalist should not, but a book is more than a media report. But you have so many symptoms and there is no disease? No one asked for the medicine, anyway, but the disease is there and one should know what exactly is going on, at the big society level, in order to figure out how to preserve what is still left in a relatively healthiest state.
Rating: 3 stars
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