Anna Merlan has made a distinguished journalistic career out of covering conspiracy theories, particularly far-right ones, for Gizmodo Media; her book-length account of conspiratorial thinking, Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power, is a superb tour not just through the conspiracies that have taken hold in American public discourse, but also in the real, often traumatic conspiracies that give these false beliefs a terrible ring of plausibility.
Continue reading and if you really can’t do that then here is the final paragraph of Cory’s post.
Countering incorrect conspiratorial beliefs is important and urgent work, but it is purely reactive -- ideological fire-fighting. The case that Merlan forcefully builds in her outstanding book is that we need fire-prevention, not just fire-fighting: we need to change the conditions that prime people to believe conspiracies, which is to say, we need to root out corruption and impunity and re-balance the inequality that gives rise to them, otherwise, the fires will become too numerous to extinguish.
Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power [Anna Merlan/Metropolitan Books] [links to Amazon]
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