My dive into podcasts about conspiracy thinking—notably QAnon Anonymous and Knowledge Fight—have brought the astute and entertaining journalist Anna Merlan into my world. Since learning about her, I’ve eagerly followed her coverage of Tim Ballard for Vice and other conspiracy-adjacent topics. After listening to an episode of Knowledge Fight, in which one of the hosts interviewed Merlan, I had to get my hands on a copy of Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power. I was not disappointed...
This was a satisfying and useful read. The pages turned quickly. In my case, the author provided greater depth of understanding about many (often crazy) conspiracy theories that one reads about in passing in newspapers and journals. More significantly, the author unifies them in fundamental ways and explains their growth and mutation. My negative criticism of this book is limited as it is mild. In one case the author appears to make a false equivalency of misplaced and opposed conspiracies on the left and right of the political spectrum. It is fair to say that the United States has a rich history of secretive Government intelligence agencies and military-industrial intrigue justifying some kind of "Deep State" notion, it is quite another to go out on the Trumpublican limb, where the Government writ large is an enemy of the people. By contrast, while there are some limits to which the rational …
This was a satisfying and useful read. The pages turned quickly. In my case, the author provided greater depth of understanding about many (often crazy) conspiracy theories that one reads about in passing in newspapers and journals. More significantly, the author unifies them in fundamental ways and explains their growth and mutation. My negative criticism of this book is limited as it is mild. In one case the author appears to make a false equivalency of misplaced and opposed conspiracies on the left and right of the political spectrum. It is fair to say that the United States has a rich history of secretive Government intelligence agencies and military-industrial intrigue justifying some kind of "Deep State" notion, it is quite another to go out on the Trumpublican limb, where the Government writ large is an enemy of the people. By contrast, while there are some limits to which the rational mind will not go in theorizing about the Trump Administration's seeming affection for autocrats (especially Putin), and the manner in which his Administration and political team was mired in Russian money, cutouts, assistance, and intelligence agents -- the fact of that relationship and reliance was pregnant and unquestionable to all but the brain dead among us. To the extent that the author's concluding chapter can be read as posing an equivalence between Deep State theorizers of the Trumpublican ilk and "Russiagate," it is in error. The Russia hoax is mostly a hoax itself.
