conspiracy theories 
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SOURCE: The Bulwark
2/25/2021
QAnon and the Satanic Panics of Yesteryear
by Daniel N. Gullotta
"The perception of a Christian nation in religious freefall fits almost seamlessly with QAnon’s conviction that the United States is under spiritual assault."
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SOURCE: Washington Post
2/15/2021
Eroding Trust, Spreading Fear: The Historical Ties Between Pandemics And Extremism
Historian John Fea says that the COVID-19 pandemic is one of a long line of disease outbreaks encouraging paranoid thinking and a siege mentality.
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2/14/2021
History, Evidence and the Ethics of Belief
by Guy Lancaster
Untrammelled freedom of belief has been enshrined as an American civic virtue. The nation, democracy, and possibly the planet are imperiled without a collective commitment to respect belief only to the extent available evidence supports it.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
2/6/2021
Marjorie Taylor Greene is Just the Latest Radical White Woman Poisoning Politics
by Elizabeth Gillespie McRae
White women have been active participants in creating and advancing the politics of white supremacy and eliminationist conspiracy theorizing. Marjorie Taylor Greene's antics are nothing new.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
2/6/2021
History Reveals the Danger of Republicans Indulging Marjorie Taylor Greene
by Austin Nicholson
Allowing Marjorie Taylor Greene to accrue seniority and committee leadership will bring her dangerous, conspiratorial and bigoted thinking into the mainstream of policymaking.
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2/4/2021
How Do You Solve a Problem Like Marjorie?
The House of Representatives has voted, mostly on party lines, to remove Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene from her committee assignments in response to her statements endorsing the Capitol riots and conspiracy theories that school shootings were hoaxes and California wildfires were started by the Rothschild banking family using space lasers.
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SOURCE: Buzzfeed
1/29/2021
Trump Taught Teachers Conspiracy Theories. Now They’re Teaching Them To Students
“More than anything else, teachers have to distinguish between what’s a real controversy and what’s a pseudo controversy,” said Jonathan Zimmerman, a University of Pennsylvania professor and education historian. “And a real controversy happens when the best-informed people disagree — a pseudo controversy is when they don’t.”
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SOURCE: The New Yorker
1/14/2021
A TV Documentary Shows the Deep Roots of Right-Wing Conspiracy
New Yorker critic Richard Brody discusses the 1964 broadcast of "Danger on the Right" on the John Birch Society.
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SOURCE: The Conversation
1/8/2021
A Scholar of American Anti-Semitism Explains the Hate Symbols Present During the US Capitol Riot
by Jonathan D. Sarna
The presence of conspiracy theorists and overt and coded anti-Semitic messages at the Capitol riot shows that far right ideology continues to target Jews in a conspiratorial, eliminationist worldview.
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SOURCE: New Statesman
12/2/2020
What The Hitler Conspiracies Mean
by Richard J. Evans
Against evidence and common sense, theories persist that Adolf Hitler escaped Berlin to live in Argentina. An expert on the memory of the Third Reich argues that the conspiracy theories reflect a broad rejection of expertise and show the need for historians to engage the public.
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SOURCE: The New Yorker
10/29/2020
How America Escapes Its Conspiracy-Theory Crisis
by David Rhode
Trump's indulgence of conspiracy theorists risks casting the government as the enemy of the people. A new social contract is needed to ensure that this breach doesn't widen.
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SOURCE: Boston Review
10/29/2020
When Democracy Ails, Magic Thrives
by Samuel Clowes-Huneke
A new book by historian Monica Black suggests that the irrational was never absent from the postwar order—and, moreover, that florid eruptions of mystical thinking often accompany periods of extreme political upheaval.
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SOURCE: Saturday Evening Post
10/26/2020
The Conspiracy Theory That Spawned a Political Party
"The question of the Anti-Masonic Party’s legacy is anything but settled among political historians. Was it all a righteous democratic force for justice or a cynical conspiracy cult?"
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SOURCE: Vanity Fair
10/14/2020
How QAnon Crept Into the Mind of Donald Trump
by Jeff Sharlet
Jeff Sharlet has long examined the role of true believers in politics. As the influence of the QAnon conspiracy theory among Trump's base comes in for scrutiny, he asks what if "he isn’t selling a dream, he’s dreaming it?"
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
9/16/2020
Where Conspiracy Reigns
Historians Rodrigo Patto Sá Motta and Federico Finchelstein offer insight into how the political right has used rumors of communist plots to maintain power in Brazil, and why the country's political culture today is vulnerable to fake news and conspiracy theories.
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SOURCE: Made By History at The Washington Post
8/27/2020
Qanon Misdirects Our Attention Away From The Real Threats To Children
by Paul M. Renfro
"Moral panics like QAnon work to distract from less outrageous, far more insidious sources of harm. Even worse, they contribute to punitive policies that separate and hurt families, perpetuate mass incarceration and keep people in a state of fear."
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SOURCE: JSTOR Daily
8/21/2020
The Text That Stoked Modern Antisemitism
The FBI recently tweeted out its archival copy of the notorious antisemitic conspiracy tract "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" without any context or explanation. Here's where it came from and a summary of its influence.
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SOURCE: New York Review of Books
7/27/2020
A Brief History of Dangerous Others
by Richard Kreitner and Rick Perlstein
Wielding the outside agitator trope has always, at bottom, been a way of putting dissidents in their place. The allegation is not even necessarily meant to be believed. It is simply a cover story, intended to shield from responsibility not only the authorities implicated in crimes or abuses of power, but also society as a whole.
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SOURCE: +972 Magazine
How the GOP Brought Antisemitism from the Margins to the White House
A new website tracking incidents of right-wing antisemitism finds that rarely a week goes by without the Republican Party boosting white nationalism. A long history of conservative maneuvering to portray Democrats and the left as antisemitic helps explain the lack of political consequences.
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SOURCE: Jerusalem Post
5/31/2020
Polish Historian Ewa Kurek: Coronavirus is ‘Jewification’ of Europe
Kurek is infamous for her radical arguments about the Holocaust, which include denial of Polish crimes against Jews. Now she invokes conspiratorial ideas about Jewish control of Europe.
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